By David Strom
My cable modem went down one morning last week. So I went to pick up the phone to call my provider (the lovely Charter Communications, kept afloat by Paul Allen’s largesse), and then realized the sad fact that since I have an IP Vonage phone, I wasn’t going to be making any calls. On to my cell, and the customer service number was busy. Busy! I guess this means I am not the only one without Internet service. Or else a lot of people aren’t getting TV service, either. Luckily, I was back in business in about an hour.
Skype’s customer service didn’t fare any better last week either. Seems like it was the target of a phish attack, and because so many people clicked on the bogus links– or because the attackers used bogus email addresses, its email system crashed. And how do you think you get a hold of Skype customer service? By email, of course! Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just, I don’t know, CALL them on the PHONE and talk to a real person?
Both of these episodes point out that you need multiple communications paths for your customer service department, if you want to have adequate customer service. You can’t just have an 800 number, if anyone can actually get through to it and not wait forever and a day on hold. You can’t just have email, if anyone’s job is to actually to answer it within a few hours of receipt. You need Instant Messaging connections, Web click-to-call, and what about those people who take the time to send you an actual postal letter, before they go postal on you? Yes, yes, and yes. Do it all.
It doesn’t take much, particularly in this era of reduced expectations, to rise above the mediocre level that most of us have experienced. Is this because of off-shoring? Because of corporate cut-backs? Because no one gives a hoot about their customers? All of the above! Plus, it is how we have come to think of the customer. My favorite anecdote: what does the telecom industry call their connection to the customer? The last mile. Hah! News flash: we are the first darn mile, and don’t forget it.
Sprint is finding this out first hand. Their new CEO, Dan Hesse, put his email address in the new ads, saying that Sprint will now actually listen to their customers, the few of them that haven’t yet switched to Verizon or AT&T. Yet, Dan (I feel like we should be on a first name basis) readily admits that he doesn’t actually have time to READ all these emails that he is supposedly getting – he gets a summarized (and presumably sanitized) update once a day. Once a day! I guess the world’s biggest all-fiber optic network that operates at the speed of light (or whatever their current marketing pitch is) doesn’t have to move that fast. Yes, Dan is making some progress, empowering all of his line managers to be more responsive to customers, as opposed to just pissing them off. But they still have a long way to go – a friend of mine, who has been a Sprint customer with five, count ‘em, five phones is about ready to bolt, because she can’t get a correct bill from them and has to call every month to fight the over charges. How many more times does she have to call before just being another one of their churn statistics?
It isn’t just the computer companies. For the last two months, I have been trying to get my health insurance provider, Anthem Blue Cross, to correct my birth date on my health policy. I have tried faxing. I have tried calling. I have tried begging my doctors to just change my real birth date to the one that Anthem has listed so I can get treatment and not go through the song and dance with their billing departments. I got someone to help me and they promised it will be fixed by next week. Yeah, I have heard this tune before.
As I have said in the past, those companies that don’t provide decent customer service won’t have their customers much longer. If you are in charge of your department, think about ways that you touch your customers and make a pledge to do something small to improve what you do, and that you will provide some incentives to your crew so that they actually follow through with it. Sometimes, all it takes is for the customer service rep to listen to the complaint, apologize, and make some small token of appeasement
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16 Comments
1. Pajamas Media » Technology is No Substitute for Customer Love:[...] Read the full post here… [...]
Jul 18, 2008 - 12:59 am 2. Nancy Heil:Add Comcast Cable to the list. They changed two channels to HD (so you can’t get them on Expanded Basic they said, but you can) and said we needed a digital converter. No real manual given and no local phone contact. Just try getting an intelligent person on the phone if you can get through at all. The workmen were great but I still can’t tape to my DVD/VCR.
Jul 18, 2008 - 7:54 am 3. Gringo:Several days ago I had a frustrating experience with my ISP regarding not being able to open a zipped database file. I wasted two hours of my day. Had the lower level service reps had a MINIMUM of competence, it would have been only five minutes.
Alternate communications: YES. Instead of wasting my time listening to ads while I was waiting on the phone, I wanted to have them call me when they were available. Unfortunately, the ISP did not have this option.
I also had a bad customer service experience with Dell. Soon after I bought my computer, I called Dell customer service, and waited AN HOUR before a rep was available. I saved some money by canceling the customer service contract. OTOH, the Dell machine has been fine. The Dell manual has been sufficient for me to figure out how to install several hardware upgrades.
Jul 18, 2008 - 8:22 am 4. Corky Boyd:My problems were similar yours, but with Comcast, my internet service provider. They must know what the public thinks of them because there is no way to contact customer service at corporate headquartere. In fact they probaly don’t have that department there.
I won’t go into my problems other than to say I have never worked with a company more ineptly managed. But I was willing to put up with it, and double the rate of theircompetitor to avoid changing my email addresses. It’s not ablout changing my address list, that’s easy to do. It’s the organizations, insurance companies, prescription providers, blogs etc, I am registered with under my email address.
But I took the advice of Consumer Reports which recommends picking the best individual service and not be taken in by bundling inducements. I had already converted TV to Direct TV (absolutely superb folks and by far the best HD provider). Embarq, my phone provider, was offering 3 meg DSL service (vs 4 for Comcast) so I am now with them. Both their customer service and technical service is light years ahead of Comcast.
Life’s too short to put up with poor service and customer relations. Make the switch to the best. You’ll live longer and feel better.
Jul 18, 2008 - 11:35 am 5. RiverC:I’d wager people spend more time reading myspace and fantasizing about how to make money with their awesome ideas and talents than they do actually learning information about the stuff they are supposed to be working with.
It’s very tempting, you know.
Jul 18, 2008 - 12:58 pm 6. sam:Let’s see. You went with Vonage and Skype why? To save money over the cost of a land line from the telephone company? Did it ever occur to you that maybe the reason that Vonage and Skype are cheaper is that they don’t hire as many persons that know what they are doing and speak English as a first language? Just wondering. Seems to me if you are looking for rock bottom prices, good customer service is one of the things you stand to lose.
Jul 18, 2008 - 1:23 pm 7. Scott:Sam has a point. Cheaper is cheaper.
Its not just technology companies, either. AMEX tried to stick me with a $29 late fee for being 43 days late (my contract says I have 45). I suppose its a tough time for the financial service companies these days with the delinquency problem and the bear market and all. I call them and get Cathy – who has a twang! I didn’t know that dialects were now being offered in the madras. Anyway, she disconnects me instead of talking to her manager. I call back and get Arul. He reminds me of the magic words – “This has never happened before”, speaks to his boss, and voila, charges dropped.
Moral to this story boyz and girlz is don’t let the offshoring thing throw you off. Americans can be just as nasty (or nastier) to other Americans as anyone else.
Jul 18, 2008 - 2:35 pm 8. NahnCee:When I have these sorts of problems, I amuse myself by calling up Wall Street sites to see if I can determine who the President or Chairman of the Board of said company is. You know, the guy who gets paid the mega-bucks to put some sort of Customer Service into play. Then I send *him* a letter full of underlines and exclamation points. I always get a response, even if they don’t bother to fix their Customer Service set-up.
Jul 18, 2008 - 4:20 pm 9. How to provide better customer communications « David Strom’s Web Informant:[...] This column was also posted on Pajamas Media this week here. [...]
Jul 18, 2008 - 6:40 pm 10. ReCon USMC:It isn’t just the computer companies. For the last two months, I have been trying to get my health insurance provider, Anthem Blue Cross, to correct my birth date on my health policy.
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Jul 19, 2008 - 2:02 pm 11. Gozer the Carpathian:I had the ”EXACT “” same problem with Anthem Blue Cross of NC ?
For 4 years in fact .I called Blue Cross Direct 11 times , then the Local agent 12 times , then my Furniture Co I did Sofa designing fore …. 20 plus times there .This went on every time I went to DR Clinic or Hosp.
Nothing I did MATTERED . So Finally I had to Print my Birth Cit. have it witnessed by three people and that was that ….. NO IT WASN’T .
in 2007 9/11 I had my Knee replaced ……. Bang again !!!!
They got my age wrong ONE LAST TIME . Finally this last MAY we settled it BECAUSE I MOVED MY POLICY TO ATHEM Blue CROSS OF “”VA ” .
I’d like to report some good customer service along with the bad.
Good: Apple, more specifically Applecare. I’ve had two major run-ins with them in the last two months, first with my laptop screen shutting off (turned out it was part of the main board) and a HD fail on another computer (Boot sector fail). First off the folks on the other end of the line didn’t treat me as a moron who doesn’t know anything about computers when I explained the issues. (Thank you for no repeating a set of silly steps I already did! [See later])
Secondly they paid for every part of the repairs, shipping, the whole 9 yards. Both through a store and through DHL shipping.
Finally, when I had questions about what they had done they actually explained the repairs and the issues. All in all I’m quite happy I switched to mac.
On the bad side add Time Warner Cable to the ISP list. The Road Runner half of the coin is actually pretty good with email, instant messaging and phone, but the Time Warner half of the Customer Service dial stinks. Everything from stupid repeating messages, to push button trails, and then the know nothing repeat the same fixes you’ve done 5 times already morons. *Sigh*
Is customer service dead? Not yet but it feels that way sometimes.
Jul 19, 2008 - 9:56 pm 12. Me:I had the problem with a Fortune 500 large appliance company who delivered me a mostly assembled dishwasher. American Express told me that I couldn’t cancel the credit card charge because the local outfit that was taking my money was acting as an agent of the large company and they were not to blame for delivering and installing a partially assembled machine.
I finally got through to a Vice President by contacting stockholder relations. He replaced the machine promptly. I’ve tried it with other companies but it doesn’t always work. Needless to say, I dropped American Express. My other credit card company said that American Express was violating the law.
Jul 20, 2008 - 5:23 pm 13. Pickles:Orkin, too. I signed up online for them to contact me for preventative termite treatment. After three phone calls where I answered the phone and heard “please wait for a customer service representative,” I told them I wasn’t interested in dealing with a company that couldn’t be bothered to have an actual person call me. They’ve been calling my cell phone for about a month and a half now, successfully raising my bill for incoming calls and accomplishing nothing else. The last call was Friday, so I’m figuring they’ll call again today. I’d send them my bill, but I’d probably just end up with no cell service instead.
And don’t get me started on Time Warner….
Jul 21, 2008 - 8:35 am 14. Eddie Stewart:I worked with a company who moved through hundreds of new customers every week. I built their customer service and fulfillment departments and had the opportunity to be the medium through which customer service feedback passed to executives. It was apparent right away that to executives customer service was simply a cost center. Customer service has to be viewed as the ultimate retention piece which in turn creates incredible revenue. Probably more important than customer acquisition is customer retention. I just read a book by Rich Hanks the president of Mindshare where he talks about this. He said “companies can boost profits by 25% to 85% by retaining just 5% more of their customers and he gives a list of about 5 reasons why that works. The point is that companies lose sight of the importance of customer service because it’s hard to measure its monetary value. But when a company can establish a person-to-person, quality customer service experience not only does the company retain customers but they can then cross sell and up sell because they have the customers trust.
Jul 21, 2008 - 9:51 pm 15. Eric:If the government takes over health care you may just have to change your birth date to what they have in file. You can look forward to great customer service then!
Jul 22, 2008 - 5:09 am 16. Fred, NJ USA:Cable and telephone companies service will change in quality and price. Always use a third party like Gmail or Yahoo for your email account. You can be independent and change providers as needed.
Jul 22, 2008 - 6:54 am