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Comment by ulfw | Hacker News Reader

We live in a world were people feel entitled to bring their little contractual issues all the way up to the CEO of a company with over 30 MM customers. So you either believe a) you're above those other 30 MM and can just do your CEO 1:1s if need be or b) you foolishly believe that the CEO of a major corp has the time and willingness to deal with customer support for 30 Million people.

Just wow

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When you realize the world consists of people, and you realize the customer is just a person, just like the CEO is a person, then this doesn't seem so strange. I don't like the world where a CEO is somehow better than the average person, completely insulated from customers, from real people.

Your rant is quite misguided. In this case, the CEO explicitly asked for people to email him:

"I discovered that Legere put an emphasis on customer service -- listening to calls and even sharing his email address."

From the other article: "had customer complaint emails forwarded to him. He also gave out his email address, ..., for anyone to contact him."

People would email Steve Jobs all the time. This isn't a new thing.

Before the Internet CEOs would get letters.

Yep. Back in the PCs Limited days I wrote Michael Dell an appreciative letter for some out-of-warranty customer service I'd received. Got a nice acknowledgement letter back from a VP. That little exchange indirectly earned Dell a lot of business from my employer in later years when we dumped HP and were casting about for a new desktop provider.

You missed the part where the CEO announced that he wanted to focus on customer service and put his e-mail address for anyone with problems to personally contact him?

Sometimes you just need to deal with someone who is not only outside of the original situation but has the power to do something about it. The complete corporate directory isn't available for people to sift through to find someone to help us. We just know about customer service...and the CEO (more or less). For example, back when the white plastic MacBooks came out, my wife got one -- it was riddled with problems, including case cracking and loads of other problems (don't remember them anymore). Long story short, months of getting no where with regular Apple support (going through repairs, weeks w/o her laptop), she emailed Steve Jobs. She got a brand new laptop as a replacement. It's unfortunate to have to contact a CEO to deal with a seemingly low-level problem but as customers paying thousands of dollars (on a MacBook, or over the course of a cell phone contract), when we have a problem that we can't get rectified through low-level employees and their supervisors, what are we supposed to do?

People are just people. CEO is not special.

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