In continuation of looking at my own experiences for learnings, this post tries to identify a common thread in four different recent experiences. Let me describe them briefly:
- SOTC: In April, I booked a trip for my parents on SOTC, where the sales guy offered a minimal cancellation fee upto 30 days of departure. Unfortunately, my mother had to undergo an operation, and I asked for a cancellation. It was a nightmare – the guys just didn’t want to settle, and held our passports as ransom. Everyday, they would come up with a different demand (obviously, higher than the promised cancellation fee) and then would back-off when I would agree. The police got involved, but to no avail (apparently, they cant do a thing if you don’t have the passport receipt, which none of these guys give). After weeks of torture, I dug out the CEO’s email id from the internet and wrote him a mail. The matter was resolved in 48 hours. Why could he do what his sales rep couldn’t?
- Kingfisher: I was returning via a late flight, and on this airport, KF doesn’t have its own lounge but a shared one. The lounge had no food/drinks that were listed on the menu. I went out and bought food. A KF employee noticed this, came up, and took me to a restaurant. The lounge manager was there – the two had a 10 second chat, and served me food from the restaurant. All, unasked for!
- Amazon: In fact there are too many – my favorite is when a book got double-ordered (don’t know how), and the customer service rep immediately acted to not only provide refund on one of the orders, but also refund international shipping charges on the same. What was the decision support system available to the rep?
I was thinking about these, and I think the common element was to devolve authority to the frontline. Leadership is more and more like herding cats. Customer service organizations are inverted – the layer closest to the customer is the bottom layer, and they have to be able to make decisions correctly and swiftly. Keys to getting it right:
- Map out exception scenarios: Customer service is all about exception handling. Apply a lot of thought to mapping them out, and how each scenario should be handled for each kind of customer. Apply rules of fairness, but don’t expose yourself to exploitation.
- Customer service is not about negotiation – provide clear and full authority as close to the customer as possible. Provide full information that the rep needs to provide a great experience.
- Keep sales and customer service separate – it was obviously hard for the SOTC sales rep to reverse his own sales – perhaps the disincentive on sales front was higher than incentive on customer service front.
- Treat every new exception as an opportunity to refine the system.
- Hire smilers – you can’t train people to smile!
Any other experiences and learnings? Does customer service belong to the frontline in your organization?
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Any one tried youtelecom (formerly Iqara) broadband service?
Try calling them up for lack of connectivity for more than 24 hrs. and ask them to extend the validity period of your plan matching the length of disconnection. First they deny any connectivity problems. Then you check up with your neibhors and tell them to call them up and check, they concede. After that you promptly get a SMS message “please log in (how can I?)and fill up a survey and we will give you 100 MB free for 3 days”. You lose your cool with this message if not already!
Finally after a visit by the engineer who fixes the problem with their Modem and you log in, fill up the survey and then you get the message “Success. You get 100 MBs free and your “unlimited” plan is extended by 3 days”.
You utter a choicest invective and vent your ire!
Now who needs 100 more MBs while on an unlimited plan? Why can’t they not offer this as a “promotion” when it clearly is regressive? I have a 2GB for 62days (speed 100 Mbps) Rs.521 plan and if you knock off a few hours every week and an occasional zero connectivity for a couple days (for no fault of yours) shouldn’t you be offered an extension without asking for it? But then there is a survey, and the final jolt of free MBs on an unlimited plan… Holy &%$#
Airtel’s Tele-customercare case is an interesting one.
As one of the commenter mentioned here, Airtel has a system that supports minimum time spending on call with the customer. Now what customer care employees do is that whenever the problem is taking longer time, they cut the call irrespective of whether your problem is addressed or not.
Ridiculously Airtel do not consider the fact that customer had to call numerous times to address the same issue. And in fact, most times Airtel never solves customer issues. It really sucks.
Coming to the great experience, ICICI Bank is the best at addressing exceptions. They are ‘the’ best in India.
ICICI Bank leaves a lot of people fuming for the kind of customer service the branch staff provides.
I, however, had an amazing experience with them. I had a recurring deposit account running in Chennai. On maturity I wrote to them for transferring the proceeds to my account in the same branch.
In the letter I made a big mistake. I quoted the branch code (1st 4 digits) of the Chennai branch, but the account number (last 6 digits) was of my Delhi account. This account number was with some other customer in Chennai.
I got a call from the branch staff, who first called my home and then traced me out on the cell phone. She confirmed if I actually wanted to transfer the money to one Mr Venkataraman. On being told that I surely did not want to give Mr Venkataraman a summer surprise she took my correct account number and transferred the proceeds to it.
Had she not taken the pain I could not have done anything with the bank. It was a letter in my own hand and bearing my signature.
Great service.
Bunch of times ICICI bank has surprised me with great service. They issued me a new credit card, after I reported it to be lost, within 48 hours. The other time, instead of debit card I inserted credit card in ATM to withdraw money. After second failed attempt I realized my mistake. Next day, they called me to verify if that failure was for real.
Handling Business-As-Usual is important, but exception handling is crucial.
I had a very bad experience with ABN Amro – their customer service number kept me waiting for 1 hour before I could get in, and I had to stay in because I had to cancel the card!
There was a big fiasco with America Online too: this video set it off:
http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=R8-p_fPH4UQ
And on the good side – after hurricanes in Florida, insurers sent people with cheques straight to the site, and people can collect the money and rebuild their lives immediately. I’d always buy insurance from a company that did this for me.
There are two things I’d like to add to the process:
1) It’s not only empowerment – that’s one part of the game. It’s also motivation – people need to be motivated to help, to create a good impression, to build that brand. that’s the hallmark of Kingfisher I think – their people are really proud of the brand and will do whatever it takes. I’ve empowered people and found that despite having the power, they are unwilling to take decisions!
2) Proper metrics matter. If a customer service officer metric is number of minutes spent per call (lesser the better) – then you will find that calls get ‘cut-off’ at just about the right time. Or if the idea is number of problems solved, support folks will ditch the more complex issues and get only the simple ones sorted.
While customer support matters it might also be good to recognise when it’s bad to even attempt to retain, and just let customers go. But for that we need to change the “quarterly earnings” metric that everyone in the world has gotten used to. (Not any longer, perhaps)