Originally Posted by
KD5MDK
I work in customer service for a company that has both in house and contracted contact center employees. At no point would it begin to be acceptable to suggest that at any point we could begin to say to a customer that the reason we are not responsible for their poor experience is because they interacted with a vendor agent. They have their own managers, their own chain of command, but we take full responsibility for their actions.
Originally Posted by
johdhj
I respectfully disagree.
The RJ services wear the Continental livery and has the Continental name on the fuselage.
It's like this: Suppose I had a moving company, and you paid my company to move you from point A to Point B. I couldn't do this economically with my trucks, so I ask a smaller company to move you. To make it look "official" and "seamless", I paint the smaller company's trucks with my company logo, and allow their employees to wear my uniform.
At the end of the day, I will be held responsible. I cannot say "Oh, I'm sorry your stuff didn't make it to your new house, but I can't refund your money. That's the contract company's fault, take it up with them."
Then we are in agreement! Short of saying that CO should be held
responsible (since I work for them), I will say that if a Home Depot sub came out and screwed up a job, I would go straight to Home Depot. I would know that it wasn't Home Depots fault but I would expect them to make right. Just because they may be
responsible, doesn't mean they
did anything wrong, except perhaps relied on a sub who used poor judgment. Look, the only way CO would have full control over all of the regional ops would be if they ran it themselves, which defeats the whole purpose.
Should CO learn some lessons from this event? Probably, but to paint CO as the bad guy is wrong.
I've run large construction job sites in the past. Aside from going over the main game plan with the subs, checking up on their work periodically, communicating with the team leader and making sure that everything is written in the contract, you have to be able to rely on the good judgment of your subs, that's what you're paying them for. They may screw up by no fault of your own, and that may reflect poorly on the general contractor AND the general may have to answer to the owner/developer for it, but in the end it was the sub that screwed up not the general.