Verizon redeems itself - for me, at least

Last week, you may recall my writing of a small ordeal in getting our FiOS phone line fixed. The problem was not so much that the line went out - in a storm, lines break - nor was it the response time of the company. It was the broken process Verizon used, where they demanded entry to the house just in case the problem was indoors, though I had to go away for several days to the Carlisle show; and apparently they needed this entry (a) just in case the problem was indoors, and (b) because as a mere customer, I obviously could not be trusted to see that the green light next to “NETWORK” was off while the green light next to “POWER” was on.

Not long after writing that weblog entry, I got a call from Verizon, a routine “moment of truth” phone survey of the type I used to set up. I answered the questions and was asked if I’d mind getting a followup call from Verizon. Surprisingly, I got such a call two days later, from a supervisor at Verizon. He was interested in what had happened, and readily agreed that the symptoms (complete service outage during a storm, with no power problems) was almost certainly “up at the pole.” He was respectful of my time and intelligence, and I suspect that the repairs process is being rewritten as we speak - or has already been rewritten.

If nothing else, this shows that there is hope for any organization where at least some people care enough to do the right thing - whether by a complex, trendy process (cascading balanced scorecards) or by a simple old standby (customer surveys and process reengineering).

Now, if only they would fix the programming in my router and TV box… but given their freedom from outages until now, and their handling of this one, I’m not in danger of wandering over to Cablevision any time soon.

Write up your repairs, please

We’re trying to feature at least one repair article every week. Do you have one to contribute? We’ve got Monday’s ready but sometime next week we’ll need to have another for the following week.

Here’s a preview of what you’ll see on Monday.

Inventories still swollen

Though the Big Three have tried to cut back their inventories, a sudden economic squeeze (one could argue that through reckless spending and poor investment choices, it’s been building for years) has thrown sales off kilter, sabotaging efforts in an industry with long lead times. GM, Ford, and Chrysler would probably much rather be able to slash truck production right now; but contracts and other arrangements don’t allow for such sudden movements.

Chrysler remains one of the worst off in stockpiling; the Jeep Wrangler was very hot, and suddenly demand disappeared, leaving Jeep with the fifth highest inventory in the industry (according to Automotive News, as are all other figures cited here). Of mainstream brands, only GMC is worse, by a single day of supply. But Jeep’s average 106 days’ supply is nothing compared with the stock of pickups. There are 107,700 Rams floating around out there, good enough to support Chrysler for 160 days should they stop production right now. That’s a worry with the 2009s coming soon, but Ford and GM have their own troubles. The Silverado is in relatively good shape - more are out there but sales are higher so the total supply is just 117 days. The F-series has 215,000 copies out there - a 133 day supply. Toyota’s Tundra is not reported separately but Toyota trucks overall have just a 100 day supply - and there are 225,000 of them on lots.

Chrysler’s biggest “days’ supply” problems, aside from Rams, come from vehicles with relatively low stockpiles - the Pacifica (5,100 for around 400 days’ worth), Crossfire (1,300 of them), Nitro (15,400), and Aspen (8,600). The minivans are interesting to see - the Dodge version has a 42-day supply, the Chrysler a 96-day supply, as the market apparently changed gears suddenly and decided it wanted the Dodge. I suspect this is due to the perception that the Dodge is cheaper.

The LX cars are looking surprisingly good in days’ supply, other than the 300. Likewise, there’s just a month’s worth of PTs out there as production was switched to the Journey, which with 71 days’ supply, is no longer looking as though it has the bright future execs clearly assumed it would - it was meant to be Chrysler’s European entry vehicle, but unless the diesel-AMT version is much cooler than the gas-automatic version, it doesn’t look as though it’ll gain the traction it needs to justify dedicating Toluca to it. At this point, Chrysler would be better served by putting the minivan captains’ chairs back into the PT, putting the old air dam back on, and trying to get people to desire it more - again. (Throwing that 180 hp engine around more wouldn’t hurt, either.)

As for Jeep, it’s bad news everywhere but for the Patriot, which is probably benefitting from gas prices and financial squeezes. The Commander could stop production now and still last for around six months, the Grand Cherokee could go on for three months, and the Liberty and Wrangler are both at around 130 days’ supply. We don’t know if the Wrangler-based pickup will be pushed forward, because they need to do something with that assembly line, or whether it will be dropped as the manual transmissions are reportedly being dropped (according to the jk forums), to save money.

Daimler put their emphasis on the Chrysler brand, positioning it rather like Chevrolet, Ford, or Toyota. That appears now to have been a mistake. If I were to operate without market research, I’d say that Chrysler is probably positioned in most people’s minds in one of two ways: as a troubled automaker that was bailed out repeatedly and changed hands like Jeep, or as a formerly upmarket brand that never quite made it into luxury. Dodge appears to have a more solid rep as the everyman brand. Daimler’s attempts to essentially rename Plymouth have, I think, failed dismally. They would have been better off dropping Chrysler than dropping Plymouth, because if Plymouth did not have much in the way of connotations for the average younger buyer - or many older buyers - at least it did not have a lot of the negative baggage of Chrysler. (Also, it would make our job easier, because we could refer to “Chryslers” as “Dodge, Jeep, and Plymouth” without confusing people with the brand.)

Yes, I say it’s time for Plymouth to return. I know it’s expensive. I know it means sacrifice (though some more investment from the people who have more money than they could EVER spend would be helpful about now. Talk about patriotism is cheap - put your money where your mouths are, Steve and Bob.) But this is the time for down-to-earth, sold, frugal, and value-based auto investment by the average buyer, and that’s what Plymouth has always stood for.

Don’t blame the (1970s) engineers

Reading a brief wiki article, I came across the phrase “emissions performance model,” and it reminded me of the Detroit automakers’ attempts in the 1970s to conform to the new emissions standards. In this industry and hobby, people tend to demonize emissions standards much less than they used to, but there was a time when it was all seen as pointless government power-grabbing. In neuropsychobiology, I did have the opportunity to read more about the effects of some of the pollutants we so casually threw into the air back then - lead in particular - and I was much less inclined to say “let’s just take off the cat and tear out these hoses” than some people were. To put it bluntly, all that pollution was killing people, and causing kids to grow up mentally retarded or, at least, not living up to their full potential. The costs of the pollution outweighed the costs of reducing it at that point. 

There’s no doubt that performance went out when emissions standards came in, and that was only partly because they pulled performance engineers into emissions work. The company - and Detroit in general - lost their fascination with performance when it backfired on them. The E-bodies might be acclaimed today, with good reason, but they were most likely a financial disaster; sales were very light considering they had unique chassis and a baffling variety of powertrain options, and the money spent on them, had it gone into customizing a Simca or Rootes car for the American market, may well have saved Chrysler from its flirtation with bankruptcy. While the company survived, what it lost cannot be understated: its European subsidiaries, the highly profitable Simca and the loss leader Rootes Group; a defense division that would have profited immensely from the coming wars, while quite probably saving many billions in taxpayer dollars; all sorts of research that had to be cancelled; substantial holdings in Mitsubishi; and, when it comes down to it, a sense of permanence. (To be fair, the company also put money into full-sized cars just before their sales plummeted; it was most likely the combination that caused the pain rather than one or the other.) 

Chrysler was making a bewildering variety of cars, with hundreds of thousands of possible combinations. Dealers had to contend with models where every single car could be a one-off combination, had everyone colluded to check the appropriate boxes. The assembly plants were overwhelmed with options and vehicles could end up with the wrong trim, mismatching mirrors, and all sorts of more serious problems. With insurance costs shooting up for these cars, the market was drying up; and had it not been for emissions, they would certainly have been killed just two year later by the Arab oil embargo, which made gasoline a scarce commodity and pushed Americans into smaller cars with smaller engines. Chrysler was in the awkward position of having a popular line of high-mileage cars - in France. Not until the Horizon would the company make a serious effort to customize a European vehicle for American use, and that was a runaway success. 

In any case, there came a point when Chrysler realized that they could not go on making a series of customized vehicles for an ever-shrinking market. They dropped the enormously expensive 426 Hemi engine, which required substantial work to vehicles’ other systems as well, and, I would suspect, were never profitable except if you added in their marketing value - which was, and is, substantial. They dropped the Six-Packs, the high-performance 340, and slowly started to detune their vehicles for emissions and gas mileage. 

The engineers were exceptionally talented, but their hands were tied. The company refused to spend more, unlike Japanese and German automakers. Weight reductions were found across the board, but the level of commitment that had been given to performance was never given to economy or emissions reduction. The Feather Duster was as far as they went in economy - unless you count the creation of the new four-cylinder cars. There were certainly ways they could have kept their performance while cutting pollution dramatically - fuel injection being the main one. Unfortunately, those were expensive; fuel injectors added around $100 to the price of the car, over carburetors, according to engineers we’ve spoken to. The executives refused to go that far, maybe because they resented the government intrusion into their business, maybe because they couldn’t justify it when times were tough, maybe … well, there could be any number of reasons. In the end, though, the imports pushed Detroit to use more expensive technology, with terrible results. Had they led the world, as they had done in the past - electronic fuel injection was first used by Chrysler in 1958! - they might well have kept America’s hearts and minds.

Because they were constrained by costs, they came up with a work of genius - the Lean Burn system. Today derided because of its failures, the fact is that the system was incredibly clever. It took the humble carburetor and, denied the sensors used in later years, managed to use cheaper sensors and vacuum signals to convey information to a central spark control computer. The Lean Burn system was a Band-Aid when a transplant was needed, but it was still a work of genius, because it fit into the budget. Perhaps implementation could have been better but Chrysler engineers did learn from it and put easy diagnostics into their fuel injection systems, when they finally arrived. Meanwhile, over at Volkswagen, multiple port fuel injection was built into the Rabbit as early as 1979, where it co-existed with a primitive points-based ignition system, allowing Rabbits to avoid catalytic converters and ace emissions tests.

The Chrysler engineers were quite probably capable of using electronic fuel injection earlier than that, having been the first to mass produce electronic ignition systems, the first to put on-board travel computers into their cars (with the Horizon), and the company that was building the reliable rockets used by NASA. However, it wasn’t until 1981 that the Imperial first got fuel injection, and then there was a long pause until the four-cylinder engines got it. By then the Japanese had established a reputation as the leaders in technology, and Detroit had gotten a reputation for being dinosaurs.

Fortunately, times have changed. Chrysler shot ahead in the 1990s, albeit still under the thumb of relentless blind cost-cutting (hence the Neon head gasket failures); and then after a decade of darkness, the company appears to be ready to race forward again. Yes, heavy cost controls are in place, but in the final years of Daimler control, Dieter Zetsche turned the fist upside down and gave the thumbs up to innovative technology that had been turned down as being too expensive for inferior brands. It’s going to be an exciting time… but our ride on the roller coaster isn’t over.

Not everyone is an idiot.

Some time ago, the wireless part of my Verizon router failed - indeed, it had never actually worked. In addition, the router itself would seize up routinely on file uploads or downloads; it did not like certain programs, and would instantly die if I tried to upload any video to the allpar.powertvonline.com site (it still does that, by the way). 

The Verizon rep on the phone immediately asked me if I had reinstalled Windows. She insisted that until I reinstalled Windows, I could not get a technician or a replacement box. I explained there was no wireless signal from either of my two Macs, which picked up several neighboring wireless signals which indicated THEY were working, and that it’s pointless to reinstall Windows on a machine that doesn’t use Windows. 

She reiterated: I must reinstall Windows. I gave up for a while; then the TV box died (gotta love that Verizon reliability) and the tech came out for that, without an argument. Two men replaced the box, then suggested I call tech support again for the router. I did, and this time, after demanding that I reinstall Windows, they sent a technician over. He put in the new box, which only crashes if I try to upload video and does have a functional wireless radio. 

Fast forward to Thursday, when I’m leaving to go to Carlisle. The phones, TV, and Internet are all dead. Verizon took my repair order and called me on my cell phone, as I’d requested; they wanted to send a tech out, but wouldn’t do it if I wasn’t home. They didn’t want to waste time if the problem was inside the house. I pointed out that I’d rebooted the optical converter, and that the light was on for power and off for network. It was no use; the problem might be in my house. 

On Monday I came back home and at around 9:30 am, so did the Verizon tech. He went downstairs, saw that the power light was on and the network light was out, and called for a truck. Only three hours later, the truck arrived and fixed the problem on the pole. It’s a good thing they stuck to their policy, because otherwise their tech might have had to waste some time. You know, like the three hours or so he spent waiting for the truck to arrive. 

The moral of the story, other than “if you have wired service, don’t switch to FiOS” or “Verizon is trying to make the cable company look good,” is that not everyone is a complete and total idiot. Most customers are quite capable of walking up to a box, finding the light marked “Power,” seeing if it is lit, and then finding the box marked “Network,” and seeing it is not lit. Likewise, if two customer computers can see other wireless signals but not their own, well, maybe there’s a problem that doesn’t require reinstalling Windows - a moderately onerous process that doesn’t really solve many problems on Macs. 

Like every Verizon employee we’ve met, our technicians seemed knowledgeable, competent, and underused by managers who seem to think that nobody but them has any brains whatsoever. We know there are fools and problem customers out there, but I’d like to think that they’re a minority - and that those of us who can read short words and can tell the difference between a brightly lit LED and a completely unlit LED should not be punished by the maybe 1% of the population who cannot reliably be counted upon for such weighty judgements. 

Verizon is, of course, not the only company to think this way. Many companies consider their own employees and customers to be the lowest grade of fool. I would like to think these companies will not exist for long periods of time. Unfortunately, Daimler had the reputation of considering Chrysler employees to be intellectually inferior, and Chrysler customers to be… more so. That has resulted in Cerberus controlling Chrysler - a situation that is not desirable from a long-term point of view, though it’s far better than having Daimler control Chrysler - and in Chrysler’s sales spiraling downwards, year after year. It has, it seems, also resulted in the loss of key personnel, like the man who tuned the Neon, LH, and original cloud cars for their fun, light feel, along with countless other bright, hardworking people who, because they did not always agree with the imported managers, left, one way or the other. 

So the real moral of the story is - it is better to think highly of your fellow traveller and be disappointed now and then, than to think nothing of them and send them to your competitor.

PS> Verizon redeemed itself!

Here in Carlisle, PA

The show starts tomorrow (Friday) morning, and vendors have been busy all day today building their tents, setting up their tables, and presenting their wares for the public tomorrow. We have our little Allpar banner flying at vendor space L10, and have also got banners on the tent.

To find the Allpar tent, just look for the survivors’ tent or the Chrysler test drives - and we’ll be right there. It’s a great location and we’re happy they gave it to us. What’s more, the Daytonas of Allpar are nearby - and in a prime location by Building Y.

See you there tomorrow!