For the past week, I have received several text messages to my phone from a publicly-traded corporation that dominates its industry. The message informed me that someone named McIntosh “has an overdue (insert company name here) rental. Please contact 317-897-XXXX and reference contract #223205.” Obviously, my last name is not McIntosh and for the record, I have not rented anything from this company for a few years.

So, I thought I would call the phone number in the message and do my good deed for the day to notify them that they have a wrong number and might need to track down their overdue equipment by some other method. Additionally, I wanted to ask them to stop sending me their messages. The phone rang an unbelievable number of times, the worker who answered the phone was incapable of understanding their error, the assistant manager told me I was unprofessional and apparently offended by my request to not receive any more messages, he said he would not guarantee the messages would stop, he refused to allow me to speak to his manager, to give me his name, to give me his manager’s name or contact info.

Overall, this one goes down in the “No Good Deed Goes Unpunished” category. So why the rant? I just wanted to point out how poor customer service has become in America. When someone who is not even a customer can be treated as poorly as I was this afternoon it is beyond bad. One of the longstanding business maxim’s used to be “The customer is always right.” I guess since I wasn’t the customer who has failed to return their equipment, this organization didn’t need to treat me well even though I was going out of my way to do them a favor. With service like this becoming more common, it should be no wonder that America’s businesses have become less competitive.

I am not naming the company because I don’t want to give the impression that you should not do business with them. In fact, I have a very favorable opinion of this organization. However, the bigger issue is this: CONSUMERS SHOULD NOT TOLERATE BEING TREATED POORLY BY SERVICE PROVIDERS. If you have a bad experience, you should take the time to communicate with senior management so they have the opportunity to address organizational behavior that is not consistent with their culture.

As for text messaging, if companies are going to use technology to improve their operations, they have an obligation to make sure they get the phone number correct. Moreover, if they fail to stop the messages after being told of their error, I consider that intentional harassment.