Customer Disservice - I

Just before lunch today, I visited the customer care centre of my telecommunications company to inquire about my data service. For the last few days, my email delivery to my phone was very spotty. As noon today, the last delivery was from yesterday evening. A review of the mail history showed that two days, no email was delivered.

I walked into the service centre and made my way to one of the agents who listened to my explanation and promptly handed me over to another support person who was at that time helping another customer out. The support person took my phone and tried to carry out two conversations at the same time. I waited for my turn each time to provide details and the support person moved his attention from the other customer to me and back.

About 10 minutes into this, I was privileged to get his undivided attention – so I thought, before he disappeared to the back – later I found out, it was to consult the data guru (name I coined for the technical escalation person at the service centre) the nick, who himself was supporting four customers at the same time.

‘’Sorry, but you have run out of data’’, was the eventual response, ‘’this is a post paid line’’, I protested, ‘’oh, let me check again’’. Next I was told by this same support person that I needed to purchase additional data. I told him it was difficult for me to understand why I should purchase additional data on a line that was within credit limit and delivered mail just the day before. Anyway, I conceded and told him to go ahead and provide the same data bundle that I had before. Another disappearing act for 8 minutes and was later invited to the presence of the data guru.

The data guru sat behind a desk with 3 or so devices in front with an equal number customers waiting to receive wisdom for their data troubles. The data guru provided his own diagnosis of my problem. When I reminded him that he had other customers waiting, ‘’I am multi-tasking and what am doing is working’’ was his response, dispensed with the composure of a medical doctor.

Not so, data guru, according to Joshua Rubinstein, Jeffrey Evans and David Meyer, people who do more than one task or switch between tasks lose significant amounts of time as they switched between multiple tasks and lost even more time as the tasks became increasingly complex.

Specifically, multitasking can reduce productivity by approximately 40-percent according to some researchers. Switching from one task to another makes it difficult to tune out distractions and can cause mental blocks that can slow down your progress.

Back to data guru, I told him, I will take an appointment and come back when he will have the time to give me his undivided attention. With that I was handed back to the original support person who took back to the waiting area, while elaborately trying to convince me to wait upon the data guru.

As I made my move for the door, a soft spoken gentleman (who later introduced himself as the Director of Marketing) came forward to apologize and offer to help. He made phone call and another guy from marketing (he introduced himself as Manager, Data Services). The Manager Data services took 7 minutes for diagnosis and solution and I was on my way home. At this point I was too tired to get details on the problem so I accepted his ‘’we need to reset your profile’’ as solution and ‘’you ran out of data’’ as root cause.

While on my way, I kept thinking why companies will staff service centres with people and processes that combine to provide a disservice to customers? Maybe people know what to do but don’t do it, like member of the audience told me over the weekend at a talk I gave on exceptional service to a leading financial institution in town. People know how to be polite, how to do effective diagnosis and deliver a remarkable service but strangely will choose to do otherwise.

In this specific case, it was clear that the support person and the data guru had little or no idea of what type of service to provide. So disappearing after every ten minutes to ‘’consult’’ was normal and so was the terrible idea of having four customers stand around your table while you ‘’multi-task’’

I know operating a service centre can be quite a job, recalling from days in telecom but I learnt which true today, is that we must have the customer and the type of experience we to create. When we leave the customer experience to chance and ‘’data gurus’’ we use the very same processes, people and tools to provide a disservice.

According to the American Express Global Barometer on customer service for 2014:

·         Excellent customer service means getting questions answered by knowledgeable representatives. Just like the Manager, Data service in marketing who took 7 minutes to diagnose and solve not 23 minutes to tell me why my service is not working.

·         The most important attribute of a successful customer service professional is ‘efficiency – the ability to answer questions or handle transactions quickly’.

·         Consumers also find it important that a customer service professional is ‘empowered to handle requests without transfers or escalations’.

·         More than nine in ten consumers talk about their good customer service experiences, at least some of the time (93%), while 46% tell someone about them all of the time, similar to the past two years (48% ‘all the time’ in 2012 and 2011).

·         When it comes to poor customer service experiences, nearly all (95%) consumers talk about them, with 60% reporting that they talk about these experiences all of the time.

·         On average, consumers tell 8 people about their good experiences and over twice as many people about their bad experiences.

 So I am likely to tell 16 people about poor experience at the service centre. However, it would have taken less time and better experience if the whole experience was designed with the customer in mind.