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Entries categorized as ‘contact centre’

Delivering the customer service promise … or not!

Wednesday 27 February 2008 · No Comments

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I’m on a customer service kick again having just wasted the best part of a day battling with O2’s customer support.

In the Czech Republic Telefonica O2 recently acquired the once state-owned Czech Telecom and their mobile counterpart Eurotel and with them what was probably the worst customer service in the developed world.  Somehow the arrogance of public ownership had combined with a Communist appreciation of what customer service is all about, absolutely no consumer insights and zero training to create a customer service resource that had infinite flexibility to be able NOT to deliver whatever you needed.  Yes, I am sure they actually went out of their way to make life impossible!

Luckily the boys at Telefonica have risen to the challenge and in a reasonably short period have begun to respond to  current needs, anticipate future ones and even create processes for resolving them.

My problem was that as a self-confessed media junkie (integration was invented just for me) I travel the world with my lap-top set up to deliver English language TV, movies, news etc. wherever I may be.  I’m not usually at my Prague base for long periods of time but this month I appear to have outstayed my welcome (at least with Telefonica/O2) by downloading more than they think I should have (Maybe something to do with watching the entire first series of Lost!?).  The result being that I received a hefty slap on the wrist in the form of a download speed restriction that reduced my bandwidth from 4mb to 88kbps - very friendly!

Now, I could launch into one of my pet subjects here with a piece entitled “When is unlimited download not unlimited?” and turn this whole thing around into a case for revealing the “fair user policy” that some ISPs adopt for the miss-sell that it represents - to my mind if you buy unlimited download you should get unlimited download and anything short of that should be considered breach of contract.  However, I’m determined to keep to the point here, which is … why having gone to all the trouble of training and devising programmes for the resolution of customer issues anybody - and Telefonica are not alone here - should hand it over to web site developers to completely bugger up.

Why, when everyone seems to be talking about and nodding to the suggestion that you should never be more than a couple of clicks away from satisfaction on any web site, do so many organisations that I believe genuinely understand customers and want to solve their problems, have web sites with customer support that you need GPS and a native guide to find your way around? (My old English teacher would love that sentence/paragraph!)

All I wanted to do was buy a quid’s worth of extra bandwidth to see me through the week and it took four phone calls and more time on the O2 web site that I would care to recall (or add-up the cost of).  The reasons for this were firstly that this service is not available via the telephone customer service, only on line.  Secondly, web site navigation was unending, but my biggest issue is that, for some reason that I can’t fathom, Telefonica O2 insist on giving things cute names that you are supposed to instinctively relate.

Pardon me for being simple, but if I want to buy extra bandwidth I’m looking for a menu item that says something like “buy extra bandwidth”.  Unfortunately T/O2 don’t see it that way.  They think that its far more appropriate to list “Data Klik” among a never ending menu of similarly cute names at the end of a navigation challenge that goes like this.

Home>Private>Customer Care>On-line Services and applications>Log-in (this is great because you are supposed to have at your fingertips a sixteen character login and password that you won’t have used since the day you set up your modem)>My services>Data Klik (if you knew it was call this)>order>send.  Sorted!

Maybe I’m slow, but it took me conversations with four different customer service representatives to fathom that route.  Yes, I couldn’t buy the service on the phone but I had to use the phone service to find out how to use the on-line service - does that make sense? - No, of course not!  Only the last guy gave me the impression that he had ever seen the web site himself or knew that what I was looking for was “data klik”.  One thought I could buy it from a colleague over the phone, but having transferred me the colleague was as confused as I was, another cut me off and didn’t call back (I assume they have number recognition at the telephone company?) the third gave me completely the wrong instructions - Oh, and I got through to a recorded message that told me that there were no operators available, but if I left a message they would call me back, which I did.  That was two days ago now and I’m still waiting!

So, I guess at least some of the morals of this story are:

  • Never trust a web developer to create a customer service web site
  • Keep marketing speak out of it - call a spade a spade and everyone will understand.
  • If your mechanism doesn’t deliver your customer service, you have no customer service.

Actually, this experience actually had a negative influence on my opinion of Telefonica/O2 and it is a really good example of where the inefficiencies lie in organisations like this.  They could significant and directly reduce their need for investment by fixing this problem, but it will be a drop in the ocean compared to the savings they would make if they just stopped pissing customers off by putting them through this mill. 

As the market leader by a long way they may be less driven than their competitors on issues like this and rather less concerned than they should be about achieving efficiencies and increasing ROI, but as one of their competitors has pledged to take their leadership position within two years I hardly think they can afford to hang around. 

Of course this is my old subject Integrated Marketing again and how it applies to the delivery of the brand promise - in this case the promise is “customer service”!

Categories: CRM · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · O2 · Telefonica · The Full Effect Company · brand · brands · call centre · central europe · contact centre · customer service · design · efficiency · management · marketing · navigation · on-line · phil darby · purchasing · web site

Is your customer service a sham?

Tuesday 29 January 2008 · 1 Comment

Hear no evilI’m  having a bad IT day!  Its bad because, since I installed Adobe Reader 7.1.1, every time I open a PDF file my computer hangs, It might be a coincidence of course, but its particularly bad because the people who I think are responsible and who are certainly the only people who know for sure are in denial.

I have spent more hours that I can’t afford trying to get hold of customer support at Adobe.  They have the tab on their web site, but it leads to a treadmill of links that just keep you going round in a circle and getting absolutely nowhere. 

It can’t be that they have gotten their navigation a bit wrong by mistake - they are programming experts for Christ’s sake! - This happens for one simple reason.  They clearly don’t want to know. 

I suppose if they admitted that Reader had a flaw they’d be in trouble and I guess they don’t know how to fix it so the best thing (they think) is to pretend I am imagining it.  Their strategy is to get me into this loop and keep me there until I give up and go away. 

Adobe are not alone in adopting this strategy of course, there are many businesses out there doing the same thing, but is sucks.  Thirty minutes ago I felt it sucks because I needed them a) to admit that their programme has a glitch - there are enough people writing posts on the Internet about the same thing to reassure me that I am not alone in this assumption (Google “Adobe Acrobat hangs computers” and you get 53,500 entries) - and b) to fix it!

Now though I’m over it.  Why? Because Adobe are no longer a feature of my life.  I’ve taken out every Adobe file that I can find in my computer and I’m in the process of replacing them with perfectly good alternatives.  Here’s the one for Reader and its FREE! and my computer is working fine!

I was writing elsewhere yesterday that its possibe to turn problems like this into positives - like Hoover did with their Air Miles screw up - and you don’t even always need to call in the PR disaster recovery squad.  However, you first have to recognise that you have a problem!  If you don’t, of course, it will, eventually …   bite you on the arse!

Categories: CRM · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · The Full Effect Company · acrobat · adobe · brands · contact centre · customer service · management · marketing · pdf · phil darby · reader

Organic Managers - The reason for the lack of contact centre initiatives

Tuesday 11 December 2007 · No Comments

dreamstime_1456833editjpg.jpgIn recent months I have been exploring the world of call centres, or “contact” centres as it seems they like to be called these days.  This is like design groups wanting to be called “brand consultancies” or advertising agencies who fancy they are “integrated marketing agencies”. 

The thing is, with the ever-widening range of contact routes available at the “sharp end” of marketing communications who can blame the phone jockeys for getting a little ahead of themselves.  But while you can fax, SMS, e-mail, mail, carrier pigeon or whatever your customers, calling yourself a “contact centre” doesn’t change the fact that nine out of ten of these places still only use a telephone to call you in the middle of dinner to sell you broadband; just like most advertising agencies are still selling advertising and very few design groups at all would recognise brand strategy if it bit them on the arse!  Anyway, that isn’t what I want to talk about.

What I have found particularly interesting about the phone world has been the culture - its like a village, everyone knows each other and they all seem to have been each other’s boss at some time in the past.  Its also a sector where managers often arrive at positions of authority via the phone rather than the management college.  Nothing wrong in that of course, but if all your managers have this kind of pedigree it does sort of limit your potential.

This leads me to my first question, which is “Is it this cultrure of organically grown managers, or something to do with the fact that call-centre life is lived exclusively on the front line that produces businesses that are purely tactically focused with no strategy whatsoever?”  Raise the matter with a call centre hard-liner and they will probably tell you, as I was told a number of times “… that’s how it is in call centres”.

This short-termism is most noticeable when you take a look at the marcoms in the sector.  I’m sorry, but the evidence clearly suggests that whatever their delusions, call or contact centres are still a long way from being marcoms professionals - in fact I took the top ten UK-owned concerns and checked out their web pages and there wasn’t a single proposition there - no, honest, I mean it!  At least there’s no danger of them failing to deliver their promises, they aren’t making any!

The thing is, as a basis for an integrated offering, a call centre has a lot going for it.  Not just the incoming and outgoing option or choices in media routes - SMS, e-mail, web, chat, telephone, etc. there’s the data - just think what an analyst could do with that!  And then there’s print and direct mail (OK so call me a Luddite!) and the many revenue-generating areas that emerge when you deliver great customer service - strategy and script writing, and of course there’s plenty of scope for internationalisation.

I’ve heard a lot recently from call centre operators who think the sector has laid its last golden egg.  This may be so, but there’s still plenty of scope for serious business in the real world of marketing - and as long as nobody out there really looks like they are trying there isn’t a whole lot of competition.  I guess the obstacle has to be management.

Categories: Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · The Full Effect Company · brand · brands · call centre · consulting · contact centre · customer service · design · efficiency · internal marketing · management · marketing · phil darby · strategy