More tales from customer service hell
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- Written by Dave Carey
If you are a CIO, there’s a good chance you’re already familiar with Bob Evans, SVP Communications for Oracle Corp. If you don’t know him, you may want to put him on your radar. He’s one of the best bloggers on CIO issues out there.
In a Forbes BrandVoice blog entitled “The Top 10 Strategic Issues for CIOs for 2014”, Evans says that the number one issue for CIOs in 2014 is driving customer-centric innovation throughout the business.
“In today’s global consumer-driven economy,” he asserts, “the only survivors will be those companies that are able to put the customer at the center of all their thinking and processes: product design, marketing, distribution, sales experience, user experience, post-sales support and service, and community engagement.”
If you’re looking for some low-hanging fruit in the customer-satisfaction department, allow me to make a couple of suggestions, based on recent personal experience…
I’m in the process of pulling up stakes and moving from the big city to a small town. And in this day of sophisticated logistics tools, GPS vehicle tracking and ubiquitous mobile communications, it confounds me that companies are incapable of providing their customers better service delivery information than they did 50 year ago. Just a couple of examples…
Despite a major retailer requiring us to be at our new home for four hours to receive delivery of a new fridge, said fridge did not arrive on the appointed day and no communications to that effect were provided by the retailer. As our new home is an hour and a half from our old one, that represents a full day lost, without so much as a courtesy call to alert us.
Similarly, when arranging for cable installation, a five-hour window was required, and this time the installer showed up ten minutes before the end of those five hours. Okay, so they made their window. But why was there no ability for me, the customer, to get more accurate information on the time of the call at some point during that day? Even narrowing the window by a couple of hours would have been a big benefit.
Surely we can do better. After all, this isn’t rocket science. In fact it barely qualifies as information management. All it takes is a phone call or text message from the delivery or service person, who knows full well that he won’t make it to the customer’s door for at least a couple of hours. If Federal Express can process over six million customer-tracking requests around the globe every day, surely we can figure out a better way of giving customers, on the day of delivery, a better idea of when they can expect to see us.
Here’s another customer service disaster, one that will have a familiar feel to most readers. Got a voice message from my friendly Internet provider a few months ago, telling me that my email account had been suspended. As my business depends heavily on email, I’m sure you can imagine my annoyance at this deliberate interruption of service. Thus began a protracted series of phone calls to my provider, who seemed to have no record at all of why it pulled the plug on my service. I was shipped from person to person and department to department, with the obligatory endless waits while the various connections were being made. Twice I ended up in the accounting department, which had nothing to do with the problem at all. After nearly two full days of this, someone finally declared that my system had been shut down because I had some sort of virus on it, and if I didn’t remove it from my computer immediately my service would be shut down for a week!
Having done a complete virus scan only a couple of days prior to this, I surmised that this was a convenient way for my provider to wriggle out of the mess it had made for me. Still, I did another complete virus scan, which again turned up nothing. Happily, my email service was restored and that was the end of the matter, though it was yet another black mark against my provider, joining the many already accumulated. Needless to say, when arranging for Internet service in my new location, this provider did not get my business.
The reasons for this customer-service fiasco were many: inadequate processes for recording and tracking customer interactions; poor interdepartmental communications; lack of employee empowerment. Again, not rocket science. We’ve had a couple of centuries to figure this stuff out.
If we can’t get the basics of customer service right, how are we ever going to deliver on Bob Evans’ number one issue for CIOs in 2014: driving customer-centric innovation throughout the business?
My advice for CIOs: find out as much as you can about the frustrations, pain points and wish lists of your company’s customers. A lot of this stuff should be considered table stakes when it comes to putting the customer at the centre of your thinking.
What’s more, you may find some relatively simple solutions that will go a long way towards keeping customers happy – and scoring you some points with your C-suite colleagues along the way.
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