Today, within minutes of each other, I received two emails.
The first, from LoveFilm, opened: “Dear {CUSTOMER_INFO_FIRST_NAME}”.
The second, from Easyjet, greeted me: “NAME: [[Firstname]] [[Surname]]”.
Doesn’t anyone pay attention any more?
Tim Trent has written an article about the BT SMS fiasco: Anatomy of a Marketing Disaster.
In it he describes some of the responses that people have been given when they have tried to talk to BT about this service.
This morning, on the Data Protection list, an even better one was unveiled. After sending a s10 Notice, asking BT to stop processing their details in this manner (the official way to say, “Don’t allow anyone to get my details through this service), one customer received a reply saying that BT have now changed their telephone number to be ex-directory, and they are thus no longer accessible through Directory Enquiries!
When the internet bubble collapsed a few years back, there was a trend for some of the surviving ecommerce companies, in a bid to cut costs to ensure they continued to survive, to switch a lot of their customer service to automated software which would extract key words from customer emails and respond with a suitable stock answer. Of course everyone made fun of these, as, for the most part, they were universally useless – often hilariously so. You certainly didn’t want to send an email saying anything like “I have already checked with my bank and they say it’s not a problem with my credit card”, as their software would only see the phrase “problem with my credit card”, and reply accordingly.
So, most organisations stepped this back a level. They still built up a database of pre-approved stock answers, but a human had to select the relevant one based on the content of your email. But, even when this approach works well, it still doesn’t really work well. (There are lots of organisations who will get really confused if you ask more than one question in an email.) Unfortunately, a lot of the time, it doesn’t seem to work much better than the original software.
Whichever theory you subscribe to (management pressure to handle 10,000 emails per day, or customer service being offshored to people who don’t speak English well, or just that 90% of call centre staff are just incompetent, or whatever), dealing with many companies these days is a very painful experience. And, as you often only have to contact them when something has gone wrong in the first place, this level of incompetence usually just pours oil on the flames.
As the person who received the above response from BT suggested, many of these sorts of companies should look very carefully at their customer defection rates and reasons. Some might be surprised to see how much they’re spending on marketing just to generate as many new customers as they’re losing through poor service.
Things to expect if you’re considering eating in the Chelsea Winebar, Belfast, and planning to to pay by card, rather than cash:
Businesses which try to pass their operational problems onto their customers – Just Say No!
Recently I’ve been having trouble with my central heating. The timer would call for heat, but the boiler wouldn’t realise this, and so wouldn’t actually give me any.
I’ve had Pipeline Services out to look at it four times in the last month. Each time they “fixed” the problem, only for it to return in a few days. Once they reset everything and jiggled some things around until it started working; then they came out and properly serviced my boiler; then they rewired my thermostat; then they replaced the thermostat completely.
On Friday night it stopped working again. It’s fairly cold here at the minute; and seems even more so since I’m just back from San Diego! I spent the guts of an hour doing the reset and jiggle routine to no avail. On Saturday morning the heat didn’t come on, and the house got so cold I couldn’t type. Pipeline weren’t answering their phone, so I left several messages for my landlord to get back to me as soon as possible, and relocated for the day.
By 6pm I still hadn’t heard from my landlord so I left him a few more messages. At 10pm I eventually got hold of his brother, who said there was nothing they could do until Monday, and that if I could get someone to fix it myself I could take the costs out of my rent.
And so began my quest.
I started looking through the Plumbers section of the Yellow Pages. The first ad for a 24 hour plumber was the delightfully named “A Plumber” (“Any Emergency, Any Time, Any Job”). He lists two phone numbers, neither of which were answered, on several attempts.
So I moved on to “1A Belmont”, who despite their name don’t seem to be anywhere near me on Belmont, but rather somewhere in BT8. He helpfully informed me that they didn’t do gas boilers, that I’d need a Corgi Engineer, and that I should switch my attention to the “Gas”, “Boilers” and “Central Heating” sections of the Yellow Page.
There I discovered Spectrum Premiere Services who presented me with a quandary. On the one hand their web site was Flash based, and contained lots of spelling mistakes. On the other hand they were one of the only companies to even have a web site (other than placeholder Yell pages). They listed Belfast and Glasgow numbers so they seemed to be more than just a “one man band”, which was a promising sign. Until I tried to ring the Belfast number and discovered it didn’t work. I tried ringing their Glasgow number, hoping someone there might tell me the new Belfast number, and was connected to someone whose accent was so strong I couldn’t work out what he was saying at all. My brain eventually stopped trying to decipher it as a Scottish accent, and I realised it was a broad Norn Iron accent – somehow phone Glasgow had connected me to the mobile of their local contact! He then proceeded to tell me that they couldn’t do anything over the weekend!
Next I tried “Boiler Rapid Repair” and got an answering machine. I tried again and actually managed to speak to someone. He said he had two guys out doing jobs and he’d see if either of them could come round! Five minutes later he phoned back to apologise that both had gone home for the night, and that it would be the next morning before he could get someone out. He was quite apologetic and friendly, and suggested I try Central SVS.
So I rang their number, only to be informed by BT that it had changed (I can understand a Yellow Pages ad being out of date, but surely their own website could be fixed?) I tried the new number and got an answering phone telling me that the office was unattended and giving a number for emergency contact – if you’re a contract customer!
At this point I gave up. Every one of the numbers I rang advertised themselves as providing a 24 hour emergency service, but that obviously means something different to what I expected.
I called Boiler Rapid Repair back, arranged for them to come first thing this morning instead. They discovered that my motorised valve was faulty and was shutting off the boiler. Pipeline, in the 4 times they had come out, had never once even looked at this.
Today I have heat. Tomorrow I’ll discover what Pipeline have to say …
Note to self:
Although the Abacus Chinese Restraurant on the corner of Eglantine Avenue and Malone Road does really good food really cheaply, remember that it pulls the nasty trick of pouring its soft drinks from 2-litre bottles that have been sitting around and have probably gone stale. (They do 500ml bottles of Ballygowan though which they bring to the table). Also remember that they pull the other nasty trick of charging 3% extra if you want to pay by credit card.
I would like to nominate the Student Loans Company as having the worst phone interface either.
I got a letter from them last week stating that I have overpaid my loan, and that I “may” be entitled to a refund, and should call them.
You are presented with 3 options: “If you are calling on behalf of a borrower, press 1. If you want to change your bank details, press 2. Otherwise, press 3″. So, if I’m a borrower, am I calling on behalf of me? Do I press 1 or 3. I went for 1. Wrong. I was politely informed that due to customer confidentiality they couldn’t talk to me, and disconnected my call.
Next time around, I pressed 3. Now I had to enter my “automated response ID”. If I don’t know what it is, I can press 1. Of course, I have absolutely no idea what one is, or even why I might have one. So I pressed 1. Now I was informed that it was an 11 digit number which would be at the top of any recent correspondence (why they couldn’t have just said that without needing me to press 1, I’m not entirely sure).
So I checked my letter, and there was no such thing on it. There was a “when you call us quote the following reference – REF.” that just ended there with no reference whatsoever, and there was the loan account numbers from my 3 loans (all of which are 11 characters long, but contain letters as well as numbers). So I pressed 0 to just get an operator. 10 minutes of being told that I’m still in queue later I hung up.
Next time around I tried my most recent loan account “numbers”, and was told it was invalid. Then I tried the earliest one, and hey presto, got put into presumably the same queue with the same annoying voice telling me that I was in a queue every 30 seconds or so. Ten minutes later I hung up again.
I think I’ll just write instead. And probably make a Data Protection request too…
This is a public service announcement. If anyone is ever thinking of staying in the Hotel Paix Republique in Paris, don’t. It’s possibly the worst hotel I’ve ever stayed in, and I’ve stayed in some terrible hotels.
I stayed there for YAPC::Europe last week; there was two hotels arranged, and this was the more expensive one – I dread to think what the other one was like. The lack of air conditioning was a major problem, and the room only became tolerable by actually going out and buying a large fan for the room. (The fact that the fan could cool the room down quite quickly was one of the few things in favour of the ludicrously small room.) Actually, there was supposedly air conditioning in the “reading room”, which was basically a 5 seater area with a small TV, where we spent most evenings playing poker. On the one occasion where they turned the air conditioning on, it was unnoticeable and we had to stealthily open the window again anyway.
The lack of shower came as quite a surprise, although if there had have been one, I’m sure that the towel policy would have been even more irritating than it was (they seem to have just enough towels to go around, so when room service cleans the room they take both the towels away, and bring them back in the evening).
I’m also not sure when I last had to sleep in a bed so small that I couldn’t lie on my back without dangling off the sides. Or had a ‘fridge’ in a hotel room that actually seemed to make things warmer rather than cooler. Or had hotel staff tell us we couldn’t play poker any more because the lights had to be turned off – only to discover that it was solely so the door staff could take over the area to watch TV.
And only having one key for each room gets annoying very quickly when you’re sharing. And it’s probably best not to think too much about the issues involved in reception staff happily giving your room key to anyone who happens to know your room number, without any identification…
Hopefully Google will now do its magic, and someone else at some other date will be spared this experience…
At the Emerging Technology Conference I heard Amazon staff say several times that Amazon is (or is striving to be) the most customer centric company on Earth. Every time I hear this it irks me more and more because I know that my dealings with Amazon have generally been pretty poor.
I don’t doubt Amazon’s sincerity in this regard, but I think they’ve got their terminology slightly wrong. I think they’re actually striving to be the most “customers centric” company rather than “customer centric”. Of course this doesn’t sound as good – in fact it just sounds wrong – but I think it’s closer to the truth.
From talking to lots of other Amazon customers, and from some of my experience with them, for the most part Amazon “Just Works”. They’ve put a lot of effort in to making sure that the general customer experience is right. But if you happen to fall through the cracks somewhere, everything falls apart and they really can’t cope.
Their customer care staff are notorious for not reading your email carefully and latching on to the first phrase in it that they have a stock answer for. I’ve had cases where this happened 3 or 4 times about the same matter before finally finding someone prepared to actually take the time to understand the problem.
When their systems work (and that’s probably 99.9% of the time now), they’re great – but it’s when they don’t that the customer relationship is at the most risk – and Amazon are terrible at handling this.
When we built BlackStar we decided to take a different approach. Because we didn’t really have a lot of money or time to make our systems work quite as well, we aimed for making 90% of orders flow smoothly – and made sure that our Customer Care staff were able to deal with all the cases that fell through the cracks. Most of the effort went into dealing with individual customers one by one rather than the abstract concept of all customers.
A few interesting things happened from this:
Firstly, we got to see which areas we were spending the most time dealing with, and so had a clear indication of where to spend our development resources.
Secondly, we found that customers actually seemed to like this approach. I’ve heard it said that a customer whose complaint is handled well ends up being more loyal than a customer with no complaints – and this definitely seemed to be the case. Our customers seemed impressed with the level of individual attention they received, and that paid off for us.
Thirdly, we found that this was even more true for our “power users”. The customers who tended to buy the most from us, tended to have the most problems, but by dealing well with them, we actually got to know them. It turned out that most of them had previously shopped with competitors, and when they’d managed to fall through the cracks there they’d received terrible service and promptly started shopping elsewhere. These customers were even more impressed with how we handled such cases as they were able to compare it with what they’d experienced elsewhere, and many of them remained customers for a very long time.
It’s seems that there’s two approaches you can take to dealing with problem cases. You can either put your efforts into ensuring they never happen (as Amazon seem to do), or accept that they will happen and put your efforts into being able to handle them well when they do (as we did at BlackStar). In reality you need to work at both, but I maintain that the payoffs are much greater from the second approach.
Whether you can ever attain that if you don’t treat Customer Care as a core competency, and outsource it, as Amazon do, is an interesting question …
Apparently it took the US Immigration Service a very long time to accept that, because most of the rest of the world write their dates as dd-mm-yyyy instead of mm-dd-yyyy, their immigration forms should reflect this.
Yesterday, when arriving in Washington, I noticed that hanging in the immigration hall were samples of the forms you have to fill in. But they were all filled as John Traveler, Jane Traveler etc., even though most other English speaking countries spell “traveller” with two ells…
People who know me know that I spend much more time ranting about really bad service than praising really good service.
For the most part this is because I get much more bad service than good service.
But last week I had a great experience. I left work one evening and discovered that one of the windows of my car had been smashed, with a large rock that was sitting on the passenger seat. This, of course, was not a great experience. But the way it was handled was. I drove the car home, and the following morning phoned AutoGlass (after a few puzzling minutes working out where to find them in the Yellow Pages). If I’d been prepared to wait a while longer they could have come out to my house and replace the window, but instead I chose to drive to them, where they replaced it whilst I went for food.
They handled all the dealings with my insurance company, assured me that this wouldn’t impact my No Claims Bonus, and best of all, there wasn’t even an excess to pay.
It was all very simple – literally drive in, give them my insurance details, go away for an hour to get food, come back, sign a form, drive away again and forget about the whole thing.
I like companies that can turn bad experiences into good ones. There just aren’t enough of them around.
