Postal Service Reports a Decline in Losses

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The Haggler: Advice to Customer Service: Don’t Blame the Computer

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Russian Service, and With Please and Thank You

Finding attractive cabin crews has never posed much of a problem for Aeroflot. Training Russians to be nice to customers, well, there’s the rub for the Russian airline and many other Russian businesses. But Aeroflot seems to have done it.

Aeroflot, which says its classic Soviet emblem of a winged hammer and sickle now represents a smile, has been at the forefront of a broad and transformative trend in the Russian service industry brought about by the rising demands of middle-class consumers.

Skytrax, a company in Britain that surveys passengers after flights, found that Aeroflot had the best service of any airline in Eastern Europe this year, a mini Velvet Revolution for a region accustomed to old ideas of Russian service.

Aeroflot beat American carriers like Delta and airlines offering old-school European service like Austrian Airlines.

“Anna, you just showed the champagne bottle but didn’t say anything,” one instructor gently admonished a trainee, 23-year-old Anna Grishina.

“This is the silent service of Soviet times,” the instructor went on. “You need to talk to her,” she said, indicating a fellow student posing as a passenger. “And you need to smile and smile and smile.”

Gone are the scowls, the cold shoulders and the wordless encounters. Aeroflot introduced training that included compelling candidates to memorize dialogues of pleasantries and reinforcing rules on smiling. Its success in improving service is being taken to heart by other companies in Russia’s consumer industries.

Airlines, restaurant chains and coffee shops are putting in place ever more elaborate service training that is yielding results; a new generation of Russian flight attendants, shop assistants and waitresses has become — amazingly, given this country’s sour attitude to friendly service for so many years — customer-oriented.

“It’s a really hot topic in Russian companies,” said Alex Sukharevsky, a partner and leader of the consumer goods practice in the former Soviet Union for McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm, which has a booming business here advising retail companies.

The trend is one sign, along with the demands for better governance seen in recent street protests, of how a decade of oil money trickling down is transforming Russian society. In politics as in business, rising wealth has given birth to rising demands from an expanding middle class.

“All of us know that Russian culture by definition is not the most client-oriented culture,” said Mr. Sukharevsky, a specialist on Russian customer service. He has taken a number of companies here through what he calls the “consumer experience transformation.”

Russian service employees, it appears, can be trained to be nice. Rosinter, which operates T.G.I. Friday’s restaurants and Costa Coffee shops in Russia, has a training academy that focuses on customer service, as does Dixy, a grocery store chain. The national retail bank, Sberbank, has set about retraining 210,000 tellers to become “customer service specialists.”

Baristas at Starbucks in Russia smile as brightly as anywhere else. McDonald’s internal training for managers in Russia follows a global curriculum, but it puts special emphasis here on “communication skills” and a course called “emotional leadership,” said Oksana Belaychuk, the company’s spokeswoman.

With these lessons drilled in, at a McDonald’s in Russia it is more common than not to find a line of smiling employees, decked out in pressed shirts, all calling out cheerily to serve the next customer.

“Hello, I’m listening to you,” a young counterman with the name tag Sergei said on a recent evening, using this polite Russian expression that is akin to “How may I serve you?”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 2, 2013

A picture caption in an earlier version of this article misidentified the role of the woman serving flight attendants in training at the Aeroflot school. She, too, was training, not instructing other flight attendants.

DealBook: Ratings Service Moody’s Finds Pension Shortfall

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The Haggler: At Quicken Loans, a Culture Geared to Customer Service

REMEMBER the recent column about DailyCandy, the e-mail service for discount deals, and the customer who sent e-mails for six maddening months, trying to get an $85 refund?

Well, after the matter was thoroughly investigated, we learned that an employee at Group Commerce, which handles DailyCandy’s order fulfillment, had marked the refund as paid, even though it wasn’t.

This explanation, of course, explains very little. What we still want to know is why so many companies, in similar circumstances, fail to deliver. Time and again, you get the sense that these companies are filled with employees who are trained to keep their heads down and keep stamping. Or perhaps communication has broken down. Or it’s always someone else’s job.

How did so much customer service become so wretched? It’s a mystery that hangs over nearly every one of these columns.

Not long ago, the Haggler got an idea of what is going wrong after a close look at a company that is getting it right. It was during a trip to Detroit where the Haggler — or, rather, his duller, windier alter ego — reported a story about Dan Gilbert, the founder of Quicken Loans, a privately held mortgage lender. The article looked at Mr. Gilbert’s efforts to revive downtown Detroit, but while there, the Haggler got a close look at a company that has thought seriously about how to keep customers happy.

The thinking has paid off. Quicken Loans was rated highest in customer satisfaction among mortgage originators in 2010, 2011 and 2012, according to J. D. Power & Associates. The company has also been ranked in the top 30 of Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” for 10 consecutive years.

What is Quicken Loans doing to earn such accolades? It boils down to culture.

Mr. Gilbert and Bill Emerson, the chief executive, spend a lot of time and energy instilling a very particular work ethos into employees. For newcomers, this involves a daylong speech/indoctrination led by Mr. Gilbert, who, on the day the Haggler caught his act, spoke for eight hours, with a break for lunch, wearing a clip-on red bow tie. (Presenting the serious in the guise of the slightly comic, with plenty of punch lines, turns out to be one of his specialties.) The speech occurs once every five weeks or so and is delivered to recent hires, usually in a conference room of a hotel.

You can learn a lot about Quicken Loans from this presentation, which revolves around the company’s “isms,” a set of pithy summations of principles. Some, like “Responding with a sense of urgency is the ante to play,” are self-explanatory. Others, like “Every client. Every time. No exceptions. No excuses,” come with their own wittily phrased elaborations. (“Clients don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”)

And many, like “We’ll figure it out,” make sense only with elucidation: “Not everything comes with a set of instructions. The innovators of the world are often exploring uncharted territory.”

Let’s stipulate that none of these ideas are blazingly original, and some are so obvious that one wonders why it’s necessary to say them aloud. (“It’s not about who is right, it’s about what is right.”) But what Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Emerson have done is create a set of expectations as well as a sense of community and mission. Employees at Quicken Loans have it hammered into them: care about the customer, sweat every detail, improvise when you need to, always deliver.

These employees are also encouraged to enjoy their jobs; they work in an atmosphere so buoyant that the Haggler was not surprised to find a karaoke machine in a room filled with a few hundred mortgage bankers.

“If you don’t create a culture at your company, a culture will create itself,” Mr. Emerson said in a phone interview. “And it won’t be good. I sometimes hear people say ‘We don’t have a culture at our company.’ They have one. But if it hasn’t been nurtured, if no one has spent on any time on it, you can assume it’s the wrong culture.”

THE Haggler can think of a dozen problems brought to this column that it’s hard to imagine could have emerged from Quicken Loans. And here is just one small piece of evidence:

A few weeks back, when the Haggler was trying to get the attention of DailyCandy, he turned to Twitter. Using his Haggler account, he sent a post into the ether, asking someone at DailyCandy for a call. No one ever replied.

Last month, the same experiment was tried with Quicken Loans, though the Haggler raised the degree of difficulty a little. A post was sent from a Twitter account opened by the Haggler with a name that was not the Haggler’s — or that of anyone he knows. The post had no hashtag and was not sent to Quicken Loans’ Twitter account. The message read:

“I am not happy with Quicken Loans! And you can tell because I used an exclamation point.”

A response arrived within hours. “How can I help?” wrote a Quicken Loans employee, identified as Bianca. “Please send me an e-mail,” she added, providing her e-mail address.

This turned out to be Bianca Mutti, part of a team that monitors the Twittersphere for Quicken Loans-related comments. The Haggler sent her an e-mail last week, from his Haggler e-mail account, and explained: “That tweet was a test. And you passed.”

“Thanks for solving this mystery for us!” she wrote back. “I mean it, and you can tell because I used an exclamation point.”

E-mail: haggler@nytimes.com. Keep it brief and family-friendly, include your hometown and go easy on the caps-lock key. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.

Online Service Is Accused in Laundering of $6 Billion

The organization, Liberty Reserve, was responsible for laundering over $6 billion over the last seven years, with millions of customers around the world, according to the indictment. Prosecutors said that the company “facilitated global criminal conduct” and that the case, which involved law enforcement agencies in 17 countries, is believed to be the largest international money laundering prosecution in history.

The charges detailed a complicated system designed to allow people to move sums of money both large and small around the world with virtual anonymity, according to a three-count indictment announced by the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan.

“This was really PayPal for criminals,” a senior law enforcement official said, calling the company and a system of related businesses “a shadow banking system for criminal conduct” that was “able to facilitate all sorts of criminal conduct that would not otherwise happen.”

The indictment charges seven of the company’s principals and employees. Five of them were arrested Friday in Spain, Costa Rica and Brooklyn.

“Liberty Reserve was in fact used extensively for illegal purposes, functioning in effect as the bank of choice for the criminal underworld,” the indictment states.

Liberty Reserve, an online currency exchange, has surfaced as a preferred vehicle to transfer money between parties in a number of recent high-profile cybercrimes, including the indictment of eight New Yorkers for their role in looting $45 million from bank machines in 27 countries.

Liberty Reserve was incorporated in Costa Rica in 2006 by Arthur Budovsky, who renounced his United States citizenship in 2011, and was arrested in Spain on Friday.

Preet Bharara, the United State attorney in Manhattan, was expected to announce the charges at a Tuesday afternoon news conference along with officials from the Justice Department, the Secret Service, the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security.

In addition to the criminal charges, five domain names were seized, including the one used by Liberty Reserve, and officials seized or restricted the activity of 45 bank accounts.

The charges outlined how the money transfer system operated, offering a glimpse into the murky world of online financial transactions that bounces money between far-flung accounts from Cyprus to New York in the blink of an eye.

In order to transfer money using Liberty Reserve, a user needed to provide a name, address and date of birth. But they were not required to validate their identity.

“Accounts could therefore be opened easily using fictitious or anonymous identities,” the indictment states. Prosecutors cited “blatantly criminal monikers” used by Liberty Reserve clients like “Russia Hackers.”

Essentially, all a customer needed to open an account was an e-mail address.

The senior law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the charges had not yet been announced, said that one undercover agent was able to register accounts under names like “Joe Bogus” and describe the purpose of the account as “for cocaine” without questioning. That no-questions-asked verification system made Liberty Reserve the premier bank for cybercriminals, facilitating a broad range of illegal online activity.

The senior law enforcement official said the case was significant because it attacked the financial infrastructure utilized by many cyber criminals in much the same way that drug money laundering prosecutions have sought to target the financial underpinnings of the narcotics trade.

“They’re not going to have this kind of fluid system that allows them to work globally in the same way,” the official said, noting that federal authorities were unaware of any other such system that operates on a similar scale. “It’s not the end of it,” the official said, referring generically to such cyber money laundering schemes, “but it’s a big deal.”

Postal Service Posts $1.9 Billion Loss in Second Quarter

Over all, the Postal Service reported operating revenues of $16.3 billion in the second quarter, an increase of $121 million, or 0.7 percent, which it attributed to strong growth in e-commerce deliveries and a small increase in standard mail, also known as junk mail. It is the first increase in revenue for the agency in five years.

But postal officials said the service’s expenses of $18.2 billion, which included continuing debt, offset the modest increase in revenue. Joseph Corbett, the Postal Service’s chief financial officer, said it had nearly $50 billion in debt obligations.

Officials said the Postal Service continues to lose $25 million a day as it waits for Congress to pass legislation to overhaul the postal system.

The Postal Service has struggled as mail volume has declined, which it continued to do in the second quarter, to 38.8 billion pieces, down from 39.4 billion for the same period a year earlier, according to agency financial documents.

Revenue from first-class mail, which provides the bulk of Postal Service revenue, declined $198 million, or 2.7 percent, from the same period last year, with a decrease in volume of 713 million pieces, or 4.1 percent.

There were a few bright spots in the gloomy report. Revenue from advertising mail increased $96 million, or 2.4 percent, in the second quarter compared with the same period a year earlier, on a volume increase of 181 million pieces, or 1 percent.

Revenue from package deliveries continued to grow, up $267 million, or 9.3 percent, compared with the same period last year.

Postal unions praised the second-quarter numbers, saying the figures show the continuing viability of the Postal Service.

“This positive trend undermines the doom-and-gloom scenarios postal critics cite — and it shows the folly of reducing services to Americans, as the postmaster general seeks to do,” said Fredric Rolando, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers.

Postal officials said they were able to curb the losses by cutting back the hours at many post offices, reducing staff through attrition and consolidating about half of the service’s processing plants. But the agency said these actions were not enough to reduce its huge debt.

Patrick R. Donahoe, the postmaster general, said Congress should pass a postal overhaul bill that will give the service the flexibility it needs.

“We need comprehensive legislation to provide the Postal Service with a workable business model for today’s marketplace,” Mr. Donahoe said at a morning briefing on the service’s finances for its board of governors.

The Postal Service said it continued to suffer from a 2006 Congressional mandate that requires it to pay $5.5 billion annually into a health fund for its future retirees. The agency defaulted on two payments last year for the first time and said it would not be able to make payments into the fund this year because of its worsening finances. The Postal Service and postal worker unions said Congress needed to fix the requirement by lowering the amount of the payments and stretching out the length of time needed to pay it.

The service also said the continuing shift to electronic communication, including online bill paying and e-mail, was affecting its bottom line. To offset the losses in this area, postal officials have asked Congress for the authority to enter into new lines of business, like beer and wine delivery, from which it is currently prohibited. The Senate passed a postal overhaul last year, but a House version never made it out of committee. Congress has not set a timetable for work on a new bill.

Mickey D. Barnett, chairman of the Postal Service board of governors, said that in the absence of Congressional action the board has asked agency officials to take several steps to deal with the continuing losses.

The changes include renegotiating labor agreements with postal worker unions, administrative actions to reduce costs and, as a last resort, increasing prices on post office products.

“We’re looking at every option to close our widening budgetary gap,” Mr. Barnett said.

Service Industry Expanded in April, but at Slower Pace

WASHINGTON (AP) — A survey of United States service companies showed that the industry expanded at a slower pace in April than in March, as companies reported less business activity and could not raise their prices.

The Institute for Supply Management said on Friday that its index of nonmanufacturing activity fell to 53.1 in April from 54.4 in March. Any reading above 50 indicates expansion. The report measures growth in industries that cover 90 percent of the work force, including retail, construction, health care and financial services.

The decline in the overall index suggested that some service companies may be starting to see less consumer demand, in part because of higher Social Security taxes.

April’s weakness was largely caused by a steep drop in a measure of prices, to 51.2 from 55.9 in March. Nearly 70 percent of the companies surveyed said they did not change their prices last month, while 10 percent reduced them.

A measure of business activity also declined. Still, a gauge of new orders was mostly unchanged, and businesses stepped up restocking, typically a sign that they expect consumer spending to pick up.

Growth in the service industry depends largely on consumers, whose spending drives roughly 70 percent of economic activity. Americans increased their spending from January through March at the most rapid pace in more than two years, despite the increase in Social Security taxes that kicked in on Jan. 1.

And other trends may offset some of the impact of the taxes this year. Consumers have cut their debts. Rising home values and stock prices have increased household wealth And average gas prices nationwide have dropped 27 cents from their peak this year to $3.52 a gallon, according to AAA.

In manufacturing, orders fell 4 percent in March, the largest amount in seven months, but a crucial category that signals business investment plans increased. The drop in factory orders reflected a plunge in the volatile category of commercial aircraft, the Commerce Department reported on Friday. Orders were up 1.9 percent in February. But in core capital goods, a category considered a proxy for business investment plans, orders rose 0.9 percent after a 4.8 percent decline in February and a 6.7 percent surge in January.

Weaker economies overseas and the impact of across-the-board government spending cuts have made businesses more cautious, dampening demand for manufactured goods. But even with the March decline, total orders stood at $467.3 billion, 43 percent above the recession low in March 2009.

The Haggler: Companies That Get Customer Service Right

EVERY few weeks, the Haggler receives e-mail from happy customers eager to praise companies that have treated them well. Given the howls of dismay and fury that typically fill the Haggler’s in-box, these letters are startling and exotic — like finding a yogi in a mosh pit. When enough unsolicited huzzahs pile up, the Haggler likes to present them in a column.

Why? Because the Haggler’s never-ending quest for an improved, more responsive service economy includes the occasional round of applause for companies that get it right.

And further, if all you knew about the consumer experience in this country was learned from this column, you’d never leave the house. Or answer the phone, or order anything online. Which is a highly skewed portrait.

So with that preamble, the Haggler steps aside and hands the microphone to a species that is rarely spotted in this space: the satisfied customer.

Recently, our three-year-old Cuisinart coffee maker started making noises akin to a strangled parrot, and then ended its life with a theatrical puff of smoke, like a magician’s finale. When contacted about this, Cuisinart — which is owned by the Conair Corporation — immediately shipped us a newer and better machine, even though ours was long out of warranty. The company also provided a box to ship the old one back, presumably for an autopsy.

The whole process took less than five days. Well done, Conair. You have a customer for life.

CRAIG STUART-PAUL, Catonsville, Md.

•

Several months ago I bought one of those LED light bulbs that are supposed to last a couple of decades. It was a Philips that cost nearly $40 and I expected it to outlast me.

It died after five months. To my surprise, when I called to complain, Philips offered to refund the purchase price plus the sales tax. They asked only that I return the dead bulb, presumably so they could determine why it failed. A couple weeks later, a check for $40 came in the mail, along with a prepaid label for me to return the bulb.

Very impressive.

BILL FARREN, Monroe, Conn.

•

You are sort of the Miss Lonelyhearts of the retail world. So, I thought you might like to know that I just bought a ton of stuff from West Elm and it all went flawlessly. I talked to human beings — not answering machines — several of whom called me to arrange delivery times and inform me that back-ordered items had arrived. I thought this might brighten your day a bit.

NANCY LEROY, Montclair, N.J.

•

After about five years of faithful service, my TiVo digital video recorder died. The company offered a good price on a replacement if I sent back the dead unit, which I did. However, I neglected to remove the cable card before I shipped the unit. I didn’t realize my error until the new unit arrived.

I sent an e-mail to TiVo, asking if there was any way they might be able to locate my cable card and send it back. They wrote right away and said they would contact the warehouse, but that it might be difficult.

Lo and behold, a week later a package arrived with my cable card, saving me $75 to replace it and earning TiVo my everlasting customer loyalty. This is the way to run a business and retain customers.

PAUL C. MENDELOWITZ, Park Ridge, N.J.

•

My husband recently took a flight from Appleton, Wis., to Eugene, Ore., a trip that included a stop in Portland. The Portland-to-Eugene leg was canceled, so he rented a car in Portland and drove to the Eugene airport. He arrived right around 3:30, which was great because that is when I was supposed to pick him up.

We contacted Delta Air Lines and it responded promptly, politely and apologetically and agreed to refund the unused Portland-Eugene ticket. It would not refund the $100 for the rental car and gas, but offered a $100 gift card from a small selection of companies. My husband went with L. L. Bean.

Given what I read in your column, this all seemed amazing.

ELLEN JOHNSON, North Bend, Ore.

•

A U.P.S. driver came to my door with a prepaid label to pick up a baby monitor being returned to Amazon. He accidentally took the wrong box, which contained a rather expensive espresso machine, on its way back to Nespresso for repair, sending it to Amazon instead.

One call to customer service and Amazon found a quick way to handle the problem. The company let me pick a new espresso machine from its inventory, and sent it to me, at no cost.

I’ve always loved Amazon. Now I love it even more.

MORRIS TABUSH, Brooklyn

•

I bought a General Electric microwave last summer and upon opening the box found that the clear plastic overlay on the control panel was wrinkled and bubbled. This made it hard to read the symbols on the panel. I thought that I could live with this, but it just got more annoying over time.

I decided to call G.E. customer relations with the expectation that I would probably have to ship it back, at considerable cost. The G.E. representative was pleasant and she asked me to remove the serial number label and to send it to her. “We will send you a refund,” she then said. A check arrived soon after.

DAVID SEGAL, Philadelphia

(The writer, whose name really is David Segal, is not related to the Haggler. But the Haggler still hopes that he will immediately cease and desist from using the name. Please, let’s keep the lawyers out of this.)

•

See? Some companies know how to cultivate loyalty. The Haggler salutes them. Really. And now, having finished that salute, this column will return to its regular programming, which is delivering the written equivalent of a Dutch rub to any consumer-abusing chuckleheads that need one.

E-mail: haggler@nytimes.com. Keep it brief and family-friendly, include your hometown and go easy on the caps-lock key. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.

New Service Helps Put a Dollar Value on Lawyers' Social Media Efforts

Do tweets and Facebook posts add up to billable hours?

Now that the Internet has displaced the Yellow Pages, many lawyers use social media to try to build their businesses, but few know whether the outreach is effective, legal consultants say.

"The reality is that the vast majority of lawyers just aren't keeping track," said Adrian Dayton, a consultant who helps law firms devise strategies for social media.

Avvo Ignite, a new service offered by the legal directory and forum Avvo, aims to change that by letting lawyers see how many inquiries originate from their presences on and offline -- and how many yield new clients.

Without monitoring what works and what doesn't, lawyers struggle to make the most of the new outlets available to them online, said Avvo executive Sachin Bhatia, who researched lawyers' social media habits before launching the service in November. Rather than sealing the deal, some lawyers spend too much time qualifying clients, he said. Many do not have a sound system for logging their prospects. And some do not get many leads from social media, he noted.

"We saw lawyers spending money to market in places when clients weren't even there," said Bhatia, who is vice president of products at Avvo Inc.

The Avvo Ignite Suite is supposed to help attorneys avoid that fate by documenting how each prospect found the firm and then facilitating communication and payment to bring clients on board. Another edition, Avvo Ignite Starter, creates basic websites and monthly activity reports and can be accessed on mobile devices. The Starter edition costs $199 per month with a $499 setup fee that can be waived with a yearlong contract.

Most who have signed up so far are lawyers at small to midsize firms and solo practitioners, Bhatia said. Social media can neutralize the reputational advantage enjoyed by Big Law, consultants note.

"It costs a fortune to launch an ad campaign in The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, but not on social media," law firm consultant Peter Zeughauser said. "Social media levels the playing field for smaller firms."

And yet some lawyers -- particularly those who did not grow up with the Internet -- remain skeptical about social media, Zeughauser said. Lewis Rosenblum, an Orange County, Calif.-based criminal defense attorney, once questioned how much he stood to gain through the channels. When he launched his own office four years ago, he relied on the contacts that he made in 29 years as a prosecutor to generate business. Answering questions on Avvo showed him that there were clients to be found online. He now has accounts on Google Plus and Yahoo as well.

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Netflix Streaming Service Back Online After Outage

Should drowsy driving be prosecuted like drunken driving? Or, Room for Debate asks, is nodding off simply an accident – like hitting a patch of ice?

Without proper controls, the use of unmanned aircraft could threaten privacy.

Cellphone Users Steaming at Hit-or-Miss Service

On Friday, four days after Hurricane Sandy, the major carriers — AT&T, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile USA and Sprint — were still busily rebuilding their networks in the hardest-hit areas.

One-quarter of the cell towers in the storm zone were knocked out, according to the Federal Communications Commission. Many had no power, and their backup battery systems soon drained. The lines connecting those towers to the rest of the phone network were ripped out. Carriers deployed generators to provide power, but eventually those required more fuel — another limited resource.

In an emergency, a lack of cellphone reception can be dangerous, especially as more people have chosen to snip landlines out of their budgets. About 60 percent of American households have landlines, down from 78 percent four years ago, according to Chetan Sharma, an independent mobile analyst.

The carriers say they are trying their best to deal with an unusual disaster. But in the past, they have steadfastly objected to recommendations from regulators that they spend more money on robust emergency equipment, like longer-lasting backup batteries.

Neville Ray, chief technology officer of T-Mobile USA, said Hurricane Sandy was the biggest natural disaster he had ever dealt with and that service failures were inevitable.

“There’s an amount of preparation you can do, but depending on the size and scale and impact of the storm, it’s tough to anticipate every circumstance,” Mr. Ray said in an interview. “No degree of preparation can prevent some of those outages from happening.”

When networks fail, carriers deploy trucks, called C.O.W.’s, for cell on wheels, that act as temporary cell towers. But the companies say the challenge with deploying these trucks poststorm is connecting to power and to the wider phone network, which requires a microwave radio link to a working tower. Because of the density of the buildings in New York City, the trucks could serve only a small area, according to Mr. Ray.

The carriers have made other efforts to provide services while restoring their networks. AT&T wheeled out R.V.’s where customers could charge their phones. And it made an agreement to share networks with T-Mobile USA in the affected areas of New York and New Jersey. When customers of both companies place calls, they are carried by whichever network is available in the area.

But ultimately all of the carriers’ preparations and responses were not enough to get services running again in a hurry. Over the week the carriers reported gradual progress, and they declined to offer timelines indicating when customers could expect to have service again.

The unreliability of wireless networks may point to a bigger problem. Over the years, the phone companies have fought off regulators who want to treat them as utilities, arguing that if they are going to stay innovative, they cannot be burdened with the old rules that phone companies dealt with in the landline era. But as a consequence, there are almost no rules about what carriers have to do in an emergency, said Harold Feld, senior vice president for Public Knowledge, a nonprofit that focuses on information policy.

“With the new networks we’ve prized keeping costs down, we’ve prized flexibility and we’ve prized innovation,” said Mr. Feld, who wrote a blog post on Monday anticipating cell tower problems. “But we have not put stability as a value when we have been pushing to have these networks built out.”

Mr. Feld noted that after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the F.C.C. recommended that carriers install backup batteries on their transmission towers that would last 24 hours, among other measures. But the carriers objected, presumably because they did not want to spend the money, he said. (Of course, 24 hours would not have been enough in many areas hit by the latest storm.)

In general, the carriers say it is in their own interest to fortify their networks for emergency situations, but Mr. Feld said this incentive was not enough.

“We ought to actually be doing this in the mind-set that there need to be actual rules, so that everybody knows how to behave when the crisis hits,” he said. “When I drive I have the best incentive in the world not to hit a telephone pole and not to slam into another car. But I still need speed limits, stop signs and stop lights.”

Debra Lewis, a spokeswoman for Verizon Wireless, said no amount of rules could have prepared carriers for the outcome of a storm like Hurricane Sandy.

“The fact is, regulation cannot anticipate the varied challenges that can arise in such situations, but we do learn from them and adapt accordingly to ensure we meet consumers’ needs,” Ms. Lewis said. She said the company prepared for natural disasters with generators and batteries that provided at least eight hours of power to cell sites.

Verizon Wireless said Friday evening that less than 3 percent of its network in the Northeast was still down. “In severely impacted areas, such as Lower Manhattan, while wireless service has yet to return to normal levels, coverage is good,” it said.

AT&T was the only major carrier that would not go into specifics about how much of its network was down. Anecdotally it seemed that in Manhattan at least, AT&T’s coverage was not as good as Verizon’s after the storm. One Twitter user directed this message at AT&T on Tuesday: “I live in lower manhattan. Vz has service u do not. You are ruining lives. I had to come midtown 2 call mom. Switching.”

Mark Siegel, a spokesman for AT&T, said the company would not comment because it was working on restoring its network.

French Music Streaming Service Takes on the World, Sans America

The company, Deezer, is one of the biggest players in digital music streaming, trailing only the market leader, Spotify, in the number of paying customers it has attracted globally. Like Spotify, which is based in London, Deezer, with headquarters in Paris, offers subscribers unlimited access to millions of songs on demand, via PCs, mobile phones and other devices.

Deezer just got a big endorsement for its approach. Access Industries, the owner of Warner Music Group, pumped 100 million euros, or about $130 million, into Deezer this month, in what analysts described as one of the biggest investments ever in a French start-up.

“This shows that they think the music market is beginning to turn around,” Axel Dauchez, chief executive of Deezer, said in an interview.

Deezer, which started in 2007, has just moved into a slick new headquarters, where employees conduct business meetings on lawn chairs and on sofas disguised as musical keyboards. “Paint it black,” reads a neon sign on the somber-toned wall behind Mr. Dauchez. Like the Rolling Stones, Deezer is on a mission to blot out the color red — in this case, from the ailing music industry’s ledgers.

After a battle with piracy that has cut its sales in half in just over a decade, the music industry has high hopes for streaming, which is growing faster than digital purchases, as many listeners decide that ownership makes less sense than in the days of plastic and vinyl.

While Deezer and Spotify are still losing money, their sales are growing rapidly. Deezer generated about 50 million euros in revenue last year, and Mr. Dauchez has set a goal of 1 billion euros in sales in 2016.

With more than two million paying customers, Deezer trails Spotify, which has more than four million. Spotify introduced an American version last year, and it has been growing quickly. But Deezer has turned its back on the United States and plans to use its new money to finance an expansion into more than 160 other countries.

“Like a canny general who decides to march around a heavily fortified stronghold and thus effectively leave it stranded behind enemy lines, so Deezer expects the streaming war to be waged on different shores,” Mark Mulligan, a music industry analyst, wrote on his Web site. “They are both right and wrong.”

Analysts say Deezer is right to worry about competition in the United States, where Spotify competes with services like Rhapsody, Pandora and Rdio, even though their business models all vary slightly.

Mr. Mulligan says there is room for growth in the United States, because premium streaming services remain too expensive for most consumers. But the field is less crowded outside the United States, where Spotify is the clear leader in streaming in many of the markets it has entered — except France, where Deezer reigns.

Spotify, too, is planning for the battles ahead. Several people briefed on the company’s plans said it had begun a new round of fund-raising, seeking to secure several hundred million dollars in new investment.

New financing is essential for Deezer and Spotify because they are burning through significant amounts of cash. To attract new listeners, both companies offer free versions of their services, subject to certain restrictions. Yet both companies must pay a royalty to a recording company every time someone listens to one of their tracks.

While streaming services sell advertising to cover some of the costs of free listening, Mr. Dauchez said raising revenue in this way had proved to be more challenging than expected. So Deezer now sees its free service primarily as a way to entice listeners into paying for its premium offerings, which include things like unlimited streaming and special content and recommendations, along with no ads.

This makes expanding into new markets expensive. While Deezer says it was profitable last year, it expects to lose money until 2014 as it enters new markets. The company set up sites in several other European countries in 2011 and accelerated its global expansion this month.

Postal Service Defaults on a $5.6 Billion Benefits Payment

The agency said it expected net operating losses to be $15 billion for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. That loss includes the two missed payments totaling $11.1 billion for the agency’s future retiree funds. This month, the Postal Service also faces a $1.5 billion workers’ compensation insurance payment to the Labor Department. It said on Monday that it would most likely make that payment, but that it would be left with a cash shortage of about $100 million.

Postal Service officials said they expected the shipping of holiday packages and election mailings to help offset some of the losses. Patrick R. Donahoe, the postmaster general, said there would be no disruptions in post office operations. Mail will continue to be delivered on time, and employees and vendors will continue to be paid, he said.

“Customers can be confident in the continued regular operations of the Postal Service,” Mr. Donahoe said.

The agency had warned Congress for months that it would not be able to make the payments into the fund for its future retiree health benefits. The first $5.5 billion payment was due last September, but lawmakers allowed the service to push back the payment until August while they worked on postal legislation. The second payment was due on Sept. 30.

The payments are required by a 2006 law and do not affect current retiree benefits.

Lawmakers left Washington last month without passing legislation that would have helped the Postal Service deal with its crippling debt and its operating losses.

The agency is seeking to end Saturday delivery, enter new lines of business like shipping beer and wine, close nearly half of its mail processing centers and reduce hours at local post offices. It is also seeking to stretch out the payments for its future retiree benefits and to receive a refund of $11 billion that it has overpaid into one of its pension funds.

The Senate passed a postal bill that would give the agency some of the changes it seeks, but the bill does not allow the agency to end Saturday delivery. The House has not passed its version of the legislation.

Although Mr. Donahoe said he expected Congress to take up the measure when it returns after the elections, passage remains uncertain. Lawmakers will have to devote much of their time during the lame-duck session to dealing with the “fiscal cliff” — the end-of-the-year deadline for the expiration of hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts and for billions in across-the-board spending cuts.

For now, the agency said it was doing what it could to lower costs, like reducing staffing levels and closing mail processing facilities.

But Postal Service officials, postal unions and large mailers said the agency could do only so much on its own. If the service is to survive, Congress needs to pass postal reform legislation, they said.

Postal Service revenue continues to decline as mail volume drops. Since 2006, first-class mail volume has fallen by 26 percent as online bill payments, e-mail and other forms of electronic communication become more widespread.