Archive for the 'customer experience' Category

Customer effort, brilliant basics, customer experience, feedback | No Comments

This isn’t a complaint ( it will be if Avis take money from my credit card). It’s feedback to help Avis improve

It relates to this Tuesday 12th July Belfast City Airport

Buying
a) I tried to book a same day before I left for the airport ( a last minute flight to spend a short surprise evening for my better half’s birthday !!) – the website froze when getting to the car choice/before offering prices. You could click on the car but nothing would happen. Tried several ways and couldn’t get past it. It was either a technical problem or the agent later suggested it was because it was a same day booking which the website cant do – if so then please add that message rather than just “hanging” on me!

b) During this and other recent searches I was getting frequent webchat prompts – its really annoying. If you are doing this during “dwell” times – why not spend the time improving the layout and presentation of your website as a better avoidance of the need for service, rather than adding an additional customer effort and cost to you. If you are going to offer webchat why not put a clear button on the pages so I can choose when to use it ( and a clear phone offer button too)

c) When I did use the webchat the agent told me I’d have to phone as he couldn’t book – surely if the chat is there to improve conversion you need to give them that function? He (“James”)  gave me the number and then “hung up” on me – ie he closed the conversation before I could ask anything else. I suggest you improve your training on conversation etiquette

d) I phoned on the way to the airport and got straight through. The agent had trouble hearing me – mobiles aren’t ideal – but considerably hindered by the background noise in the call centre. It didn’t sound like Manchester or Barcelona – have you outsourced?

e) I made the booking including my wizard number and credit card – he handled it quickly and well ( it seemed…)

Pick up
f) First off the flight and straight through – only one guy in front of me at the desk but it must have been a complex one and there was only one member of staff. A couple of guys behind the screen behind the desk as I walked up were perhaps going off shift as it was 3.47 and a bank holiday in Belfast. I know the time as I texted as I walked up and checked it ten mins later when I saw the stop watches on the counter saying £20 voucher if you wait more than 3 minutes – I didn’t bother picking one up and I never got offered a £20 voucher

g) The lady ( Sandra) apologised for delay when she’d finished ( about 5 past 4) and said she’d not been able to have keys ready as my credit card had failed. I asked the digits and they weren’t recognisable. She said that was what was recorded with my wizard number when I first registered it online – I said it couldn’t be. (Mystery solved later). We used my credit card – all fine. Signed the bits and went to car.

h) Off to car park and found car. Doh – scratches not marked on the sheet. This happens a lot. Avis car park cabin isn’t occupied – drat. Wondering whether to bother going back to the terminal when I notice the paperwork is not in my name – ah that explains the credit card issue. It’s a booking for 5 days, not 14 hours, so I can start to imagine the future credit card bill I’ll no doubt get to sort out. I look for a phone number on the paperwork to ring the desk – not there, so off I trek back to the terminal

i) No queue and we sort out the credit card and another car in short order.  The car has 5 dings marked on the paperwork – this doesn’t bode well as I’m betting there’s more. Why is that car in service? I ask for a phone number and Sandra offers to ring me in 5 mins to check with me

j) I go back out to the cars and guess what – the car has some dings missing and some additional ones. Final straw is the tank isn’t on the full marker. I’m outta here. Sandra rings and I am not happy. I walk back and insist on her sorting out the credit card here and now as I’m going elsewhere. She can’t – I have to ring…… I ring and hand her my phone while I go the next desk and get a car “with no dings in it please”. It takes 2 mins, is bigger for the same price and has no dings. I retrieve my phone and take the desk phone number and Sandra’s name in case the bill becomes a problem. She’s “not allowed” to give out her surname – what’s that about !  Maybe the sign for disgruntled customers on an Avis call centre door in Oklahoma gives a clue  

Its now an hour after I came to the desk first time. That’s one hour out of an evening and a mood that isn’t fit to take to a birthday surprise visit!!  I take my time on the 30 min drive and wonder why I didn’t just phone a cab

Post event
k) At 5.30 next morning I drop the car back and tweeted a question using #avis . I’ve seen no response

l) Today I’m booking again – shall I use Avis? There isn’t anywhere to give suggestions on your website.  The “we try harder” site now looks corporate rather than a forum to give feedback – I couldn’t find anywhere obvious to post. I can only find the complaints email address.

m) I write this journey down in an email – but haven’t sent it yet. Why go to the effort? Avis used to be a really nice client 10 years ago and I’ve used them ever since. I love Angie Court’s passion – is she being missed in Avis UK?

This example shows a typical multichannel customer journey and I can use it as an example. It’s a useful lesson on how the different channels don’t hang together and how some upstream decisions affect the experience eg car condition policy before fixing them, eg resourcing for staff in car park and at desk to do the job fully eg better sound deadening/ microphones in call centre. In isolation some are minor issues, some major – but the real issue is how they add up. This is typical of what causes complaints – no one thing.

More importantly it shows how customer effort can creep into every step. Avis is normally a great example of “The Best Service Is No Service” with very little customer effort – go online, book, pick up key, drop car.

n) The good news ( so far …) is that Avis haven’t taken anything off my credit card

The bottom line
Avis just lost my two bookings for Italy in August – one cost £700+ and the other cost £300.

Have they lost me forever? It depends what happens next. I wont send by email yet, I’ll tweet this and see what happens.

Customer effort, brilliant basics, broken websites, complaint, customer experience, europcar, feedback, listening | No Comments

Trust is like … well many things. Think of it in the context of your friends. Try this question: “I only spend time with people who…..?”

“I respect? I like? Are passionate about shopping/football/etc? Are like me? Not like me?”  I expect “who I trust?” must come in up for most people. So why would it be any different for any company/consumer – trust is there, but what does it mean?

If your friend says “I am fantastic” what do you think? Even if he/she is fantastic…. Would you trust them?

If another friend says someone else if fantastic – then it’s different. If you trust that friend, their belief carries to the someone else. Unless that someone else proves to not be fantastic. And then both friends become less trusted.

On the other hand if that someone else backs it up in their actions then you believe it. And you trust the first friend even more.

So to business. Companies stand up and shout “I’m fantastic”. It may or may not be true. If you try them once and they are, you may carry on. If you try their product or service and it’s less than they say – the trust is broken. It may still be excellent, but if isn’t what they promised then the trust is broken.

If companies don’t shout from the rooftops but their customers do, the same applies – when you try it, it’d better be as good as they say. Otherwise trust is broken and trust in their advocates is also broken.

This is why:
a) Advertising only works if something is good. Advertising something that isn’t as good as the promise, results in people finding that out faster. And telling their friends sooner.
b) Advocacy only works if its genuine. False friendship breaks is spotted very quickly and trust is broken.
c) Trust is about what happens when a customer does something. It isn’t marketing. Marketing has to check out what the business is capable of and make the advertising fit the truth. 
d) Trust is every contact in every way – this is why customers value consistency very highly.

Trust is………”trust is like virginity – you can only lose it once!”

Marketing promise, accountability, customer experience, honesty | No Comments

This astounded me.  You should read it as an email chain, starting at the bottom. Is a machine error or just a crass process? What a waste of everyone’s time!

“Hello

Thanks for your email.

The characters from the security answer you’ve given in your email aren’t quite right. We need the 2nd and 3rd characters of the answer to your security question. It’s the question we ask you when you call us (e.g your mother’s maiden name, your pet’s name or the first school you went to).

If you can’t remember that, please reply with the date you got your last bill and how much it was for.

We’ll be able to help you as soon as we get the right details.

Regards

XX Customer Service

Original Message Follows:

————————

Cheers – have been trying stores, call centre, web chat to find out what

my options are for the past 3 months since my iphone went into reboot on

any long conference calls

Appreciate my contract is up next week

What I want is the next iphone and I believe its not due for a few

months – so I don’t want a long term contract.

What are my options apart from leaving you?

Can you give me my usage data profile against tariff proposed so I can

get the right tariff? I’m always paying extra for 08 numbers – which is

conference calls. I know I use circa 1 gig a month data and that my

texts and voice is perhaps way under the limit

Peter

On 6 Jun 2011, at 13:42, xxxxx wrote:

Hi peter

This is an email from XXX to let you know that you are a Platinum customer and I am your account manager, I am here to help with any queries that you may have as well as to let you know about the great ways that XXX could be saving you money. If you want to find out more then call 402 from your handset or email me back and I will be happy to help you,

There is a link below to let you know of all the great benefits of being an XXX Platinum customer. You also now have my email address so if there is anything at all I can help you with just let me know.

http://www.XXX.co.uk/explore

Thanks

vanessa’

Customer effort, Uncategorized, customer experience | No Comments

The 2011 Netpromoter benchmarks report does say lots of obvious things. But that can be useful when said with numbers. Take this parargraph:

“Businesses are expected to spend $214.3 billion on advertising in 2011, according to SNL Kagan. But only 4 percent of Americans trust advertising the most as an information source when choosing products or services. Instead, the Satmetrix study finds that consumers most trust recommendations from independent sources (83 percent), especially those with whom they have personal relationships. Half of consumers (50 percent) cited personal recommendations from friends, family or colleagues as the most trustworthy source of information. And, approximately four times as many people trusted product test reviews (18 percent) or consumer opinions posted online (15 percent) as compared to advertising.”

So here’s one to  discuss with your board colleagues…… the exam question is “What would the business look like if we spent 83/4 times, let’s say 20 times, as much on improving the colleague and customer experience as we do on marketing our brand or product?”

Anyone who  has played with business simulators will know that more advertising of a poor performing service or product just leads to a worsening economic cycle – higher acquisition costs, higher cost to serve, low retention. Word of mouth reality outstrips advertising glitz.

And the opposite is true. Businesses like Amazon, Google ,eBay and Skype took off and stay up there without much, if any, advertising support. You can read more about Amazon and Google in our “100 things you can learn from …” series at our website.

100 things, 21st century marketing, Amazon, Google, customer experience, ebay, netpromoter, word of mouth | 1 Comment

Netpromoter scores abound and it’s interesting to see the US NPS benchmarks now being published in competition with the American Customer Satisfaction Index ( ACSI ) . Recently colleague Bill Price in the US was speaking at a conference on customer happiness and we all continue to push the case for removing dumb things under the banner of reducing customer effort (search categories: “customer effort”), another way of measuring customers.

So many things to measure: likelihood to recommend, satisfaction levels, happiness and effort.

I just wish people would stop putting their money and energy into measuring and use it to change things instead. The top scorers in all the these measures are the same people. The Amazons, USAAs, Southwesterns. They don’t need to be told their scores in order to change things. They live that way. They’re always listening and changing. Open to feedback, honest and transparent towards their customers and their staff.

The attention is on doing the right thing, not on measuring if we did the right thing.

Take two examples yesterday and today.

The Apple store in Covent Garden. So good it makes you purr. Sales help given, diagnostic tool for iphone and service given, additional questions answered, no time wasted. No one has tried to measure me.

Booking some Virgin Atlantic flights today. So poor I nearly gave up 3 times. 75 minutes in total. It was only the very poor chance of finding anything better ( in process terms) that stopped me. Measured in the middle of the process. And failed my feedback test: when speaking to the agent I asked what she’d do if I gave feedback and was offered the website as a place to put it.

There’s just no excuse for some of the obvious things…. the agent had to book my kids whilst I booked myself at the same time in order to get on the same flight for sure. Why? Neither she nor I can book flights on the same place out and different flights back – that’s got to be pretty common. Her price quote for me is higher than mine. The website rejected both bookings part way through booking and then changed the prices when I went back in. The webchat help can’t do anything to help as the process doesn’t allow. The credit card fees are per booking at £30+. I get pinged to give them webchat feedback scores on the agent – completely irrelevant and untimely. You can hardly hear the poor woman in the new Swansea call centre for background noise. She got off the phone pretty pronto when I started asking about sitting all 4 of us together.

And I’m writing this blog whilst I wait for my confirmation emails so I can book car hire and parking. 50 minutes and waiting. I’ll have to go back into the site and look up my arrival times.

OK so Ive booked with them but would I recommend them on any measure? Do they know these things are broken? Betcha they do.  Do they care – they got significant sum of money anyway.

I suggested the advisor bring up some benchmarks in her monthly feedback session – easyjet, the passport office, directgov. Will it change – I doubt it very much. It was like this the last time I flew with them and the time before and so on…..

So if you cant offer good service, if you aren’t already a benchmark, then don’t measure me – it makes my experience worse still. Talk to your front line staff – they know what the score is. And they know what to do about it.

Postscript: It’s now the day after. Needless to say the only pre book seats available are in 2s.

No confirmation emails came anyway, only a text for one of the bookings so I have had to ring and get the ref for the other. No answer on the customer services line so I gave up and rang using the sales option. Despite a vehement attempt to get rid of me, I hung on in and got them to give me the missing ref. Emails had been sent and failed apparently. They never send text confirmations apparently so that’s confusing.  So I called again, hung on til I got thro to customer services but couldn’t be helped. We, the agent and I, decided the only way to get 4 seats together in advance was to reach Richard Branson and get him to change the system. I really really wish I hadn’t given my money to Virgin til booking 4 people out, 2×2 back was solved. No wonder the first agent got off the phone fast yesterday when I mentioned seats.

Apple, Customer effort, Customer satisfaction, Virgin, airlines, broken websites, customer experience, feedback, netpromoter | No Comments

What’s the most basic service requirement a customer wants from their mobile phone company? An accurate bill? A call centre that answers the phone? No – making and receiving phone calls would be the most basic thing. And it’s become a challenge. The best service is no service has been taken too literally!

I’m old enough to remember when MF tone dialling replaced pulse tone dialling – what does that mean? The phone at the other end started ringing the millisecond you pressed the last digit on the phone. Oh how I wish I could get that on my mobile phone. Some days, working in Soho as we do, I just wish I could make a call after any length of delay. Or just receive a call rather than picking up delayed voicemails on the way home.

It’s not a problem of reception or signal strength, just network congestion. Too many customers doing too many things.

My dilemmas as a customer are simple: Buy out of the contract and move. Or not. I dont have a common sense option of being let out of contract to get a service that works where & when I work.

The dilemmas as a business are slightly different. At a customer by customer level: let the customer out of the contract so they can get service from someone else. Or keep them locked in and take the money. “Bad profits” as Don Peppers calls it. At an investment level: spend many millions ahead of the growth curve to give good access to the services sold. Or slow down products going to market so the network always works. Or keep selling services and don’t worry about it.

So let me sit in the CEO’s chair: What data would I need to answer the question and do the right thing, or at least optimise the outcome? If I am CEO what do I do?

The first issue would be “How will I judge my success?” : Revenue lost/not lost over the next 12 months? Lifetime value of a customer lost times the number of customers lost versus the investment costs in the network? Or just living our values and doing the right thing? With any of these criteria surely it should be an easy decision.

But what about shareholder expectations? Do they want the best answer for this quarter, for this year or the next 5 years? Do they want anything other than a financial or customer head count? Can they judge the future financial value of the change in a short term retention figure? Will they judge your dip in growth of customers, or your long term revenue prospects?

And what if you only run marketing, or only new sales, or only retentions, or only revenues  or only service? How much do you need to optimise the overall success of the business vs your target or result?

These problems surface all over the business. The staff you talk to as a customer live with it everyday. They tell you so. People in store, in contact centres dealing with queries about network congestion which they cannot resolve. They become numb to it. There’s nothing they can do to change it.

Or is there?

As CEO or agent or silo head or customer, I can look on the customer forum and see that 83229 customers from 110078 have viewed a tech support entry called “calls go straight to voicemail”. Its the biggest issue. By far. And its been running from 2008 til now. And the manufacturer is getting a dirty name as their phone is being blamed.

Reading the original thread,  I can see the problem explained “I have a 3g {phone} and am having some problems. The fault is intermitant but happens on a frequent basis. When people call me the call goes straight to voicemail. If they leave a message it can take up to 2 hrs to come through. Also text message are arriving upto the same period after people send them. Sometimes it can take upto 30 secs to connect a call. I have been speaking to second line support at {telco} but they have thus far no answer. I am on my 3rd {phone} and second sim card. I am begining to think I may not be destined for a {phone}. If this continues will they change the handset for a different model ?”

You don’t have to read many posts to realise that customers, collectively, have eliminated all the options and some have worked out its not the phone or the sim – there’s a problem of congestion on the network. Yet tons of resource is still going into swapping phones and sims out.

In fact looking at all the forums there’s only one bigger issue with 153k reads – “Network down”. In fact that runs since 2008.

So maybe the network investment deserves some attention?

But as CEO, or silo head, I need real data to size the problem. This is where our WOCAS processes come in. They can help size the problem, rate the impact problem, root cause the problem, investigate the commercial opportunities around it and put it into a prioritisation framework. And if acted on, track & communicate those actions, transparently. If management wants to do this we know how to do this.

At the moment this provider seems not to be seeing the most basic service problem and no amount of sticking plaster or great measurement system or recovery care service will help that. No amount of “score me” post call feedback is going to help them see it.

Only if they start to talk about the problem openly will staff feel optimism, the investment get to the top of the agenda and customers think differently of them.

If giffgaff ran this network – how would it look then? What data would be published about network performance? What would be done about it? How much more money would it generate by doing the right thing?

And that’s the issue that faces CEOs everywhere – there’s no hiding place in the social world. if you are not open and transparent you face two problems. Customers know anyway and have the tools to share that knowledge. Staff know and if they can’t do anything about it then how do they feel?

I’m off to search the other communities to see who has least congestion problems. Apart from the company that locked me in for a year when they had no network coverage 21 years ago ( thats about £50k of revenue they have missed out on so far ) and the one that didnt want to help me 2 years ago when my phone was stolen and I needed a new phone straight away.

Customers have long memories when it comes to “doing the right thing”. I have a memory of pressing a button and the phone ringing immediately at the other end.  Have phones gone backward since 1976? Or from when they were invented: March 10th 1876?

Crowdsourcong & crowdservicing, Voice of the Customer, WOCAS, brilliant basics, customer experience, feedback, honesty, listening, social media | No Comments

5pm in an airport Sunday. Started work at 1.30 and in 3 hours work I have achieved very little.

a) Not started on real work tasks

b) Eventually downloaded all email attachments to prep a board meeting next week after some resends and an hour of waiting. Not had chance to read any.

c) Not booked car parking for next week – no log on ability on main screen and I know if I try to book it will reject me as my email address is already in use. So I have to book, fail, then log in and book again.   (Gatwick)

d) Not printed air tickets for tomorrow (Easyjet) as access failed after trying my passwords. So tried for new password and but email hasn’t come so I suspect it was a site error rather than password error. Trying later shows this to be so. Tried tweeting them as no route through help to resolve.

e) Not entered supplementary details for another air ticket ( Easyjet) for next week so I can print them – why does France want my passport details, its not Spain or Portugal – looks like a lazy process for flying abroad.

f) Tried at airport and failed to make macbook connect with phone as bluetooth connection is failing.

g) So couldn’t connect to personal bank and pay bills and make Jan 31 tax payment.

h) Cant connect to business bank and make authorisations that have been waiting since Friday as it kicks me off half way through

i) Cant update to blog – saved text til later.

j) Cant update weekly work and comms tasks in work wiki

h) Cant download and read the research papers I need for tomorrow.

i) Cant get into Twitter, Linked In and Facebook to check and update

I did manage to renew my travel insurance – well done Multitrip – an actual low touch service. Fished out email from a month ago. Clicked on link which had my sign on & password below it. Copied password and entered site. Chose renew. Checked all cover features ( and could have selected/deselected each feature. Entered card details. Renewed. Choose to print papers or just leave online. Very little customer effort and really well thought through.

Contrast this process from first direct to pay my tax bill this evening when I got home ( and yes I’m a fan and dont like slagging them off but heh its been a long day…) I make the payment online, it  insists I phone them to confirm after making payment on line. Fair enough but when I have to done so to confirm, they insist they ring me back tomorrow to do it again. I tell them thats dumb but if they insist if they do that then its after 1.30, on my mobile and with a good reason why. Two minutes later the same guy tries to get thro by mobile which has zilch signal at home. I call them again, pass security again and they say they still need to call me back again. They haven’t got my home number so I give it them. They phone me on it – so how secure is that.  I go through security again and get no more info than on the first call. Talk about dumb. I gave the poor lady feedback. Directly.

I sometimes feel my internet time is at a premium between meetings, at airports, interrupting just being at home. At home in Kent, or in County Down, in the office, or through my mobile – I rarely get a fast service anymore ( and yes, all checked, it isn’t the laptop or software). Last week I travelled all the way from London to Bristol without getting any service fast enough to download the last minute papers for the meeting I was going to – its no better by mobile.

So here I am another 75 mins later. And still not started work.

Customer effort, customer experience, first direct, insurance, self service | No Comments

Dealing with paperwork is never easy. My kitchen is usually full of it on every surface. And none of it is work related as I don’t use paper beyond a day book.

So why do companies send me paper? No doubt they have their reasons but if they want to do business with me why don’t they change? It can’t be more efficient for them and it sure slows things down. Great if they want to say  ’the cheque is in the post”, not if they want to sell me something or keep me as a customer. Dealing with paperwork is too much effort for me – so it must be for them.

Take the example in the picture. This is me trying to cancel some policies and buy some new ones. You can see errors and the history of their processes on the receiving end of this chopped down forest – so presumably the signatories and front line staff can see the corresponding problems at their end? Nahhh

How did it get this far? For example:

a) We can’t cancel the policy unless you put it in writing. But I’ve passed security, you’re recording the call and you’re putting my money back into my same bank account from where it came. We’ll send you the forms.

b) We’ll need the original policy from 15 years ago. Why? You were happily taking my money for 15 years so presumably you have a copy and know what you’re providing. I haven’t got it. You’ll need the XYZ form. Have you got it online. No, yes, maybe.

c) Why can’t you upgrade me to a policy that matches the internet new customer offer – which is why I want to cancel? No, you have to cancel and start over. Starting over means a 20 minute interview and then loads of paper ….. I don’t want the paper – you have to have it. Can you email it. I don’t have email.

d) I’ll just stop the direct debits then I won’t need to do your paperwork. But we wont give you your money back. Great, I’ll have to follow your process but I wont do business with you anymore.

e) What would you do if I gave you feedback to help you improve your process…..? You can guess the answer.

Not to mention, the same letters sent twice, the same forms with different contents, the endless explanations that are incomprehensible. And endless compliance statementy stuff that has no relevance to anything I’m trying to do. The final straw is the checklist that I’m asked to send to show I’ve read all their bits, enclosed all the bits.

There’s a clue here folks – when you need your customer to checklist your work…..maybe the customer effort is becoming silly and the business prevention officer has gone too far. Anyone from Friends Provident want some free consulting?

Customer effort, customer experience, financial services | 1 Comment

What does it say about a bank when the easiest and least “customer-effort” transaction is closing an account? I’ll leave you to ponder what the right answer to that question should be, and limit myself to telling you the story.

Despite the evidence to the contrary, I continue to believe that companies do actually take notice of the world around them and try to learn from the best of their competitors / peers. I guess that makes me a “glass half full” kind of person. Even so, I should not have been surprised by my recent experience with a UK online bank.

Like everyone else, I am keen to find any kind of reasonable return from my (admittedly modest) savings. This has been tough over the last couple of years with low rates of interest. Like many others, I have been tempted by the special 12 months bonus rate offers and opened such an account in late 2009.

The bank in question was then a new venture from a well-established UK financial institution, perhaps best known for it’s insurance products. When they decided to create an entirely online banking arm,  I am sure they studied the existing providers. After all, Internet banking is hardly a new phenomenon any more.

But, if they did study competitors or best practice, they were not good students because the result was an all-too typically appalling customer experience. The initial account opening process was not too awful, although my memory is of too many things arriving in the post in a rather disjointed fashion. But I cannot be sure that is an entirely fair assessment as I am aware how much negative overlay might have been added by later, worse interactions.

I have only needed to transact on the account three times (it is, after all, for savings) – twice to transfer money in and, a few days ago, to transfer some out. Because of the infrequency of use, I could not remember all of the relevant security information to gain access. I was okay with remembering two of the needed three pieces of information – unique customer ID, online password and PIN – but could never remember all three.

The fail-safe security design meant that the account was blocked after three failed attempts … an action about which I have very mixed feelings. I can understand that  it is a good thing to limit the vulnerability of accounts to being ‘hacked’ – and applaud that. But, at the same time, the risk has to be balanced with how the experience is managed for valid but forgetful customers.

Other organisations providing secure commercial online transactions have long ago figured out how to help customers recover their security information via self-service. This not only allows the customer to complete the interactions quickly and efficiently, it also reduces the workload on customer services staff. Indeed Amazon has had this cracked for about ten years now. (As a n aside, I am not sure that ‘cracked’ is a good choice of word in this context …)

But, in the case of this bank, no such luck. Hope was raised initially with a ‘Forgotten your password?’ hyperlink, but dashed when clicking this link only produced this onscreen message:

“Please contact our Customer Services Team for assistance on 0845 xxx xxxx  (our opening hours are: Mon, Tue, Thurs, Fri 08:00-18:00 Wed 10:00-18:00).”

Now, that was doubly frustrating. Not only could I not help myself, but I could not get help at all at that time (Saturday afternoon). And they all have a nice lie-in on Wednesdays! Actually, given the way I felt at that point, I could understand that their agents are probably exhausted and stressed-out having to deal with irate customers all day. So much for making banking accessible 24 x 7 on the Internet.

By Monday morning, my anger had escalated to the extent that I had decided not to transfer some money any more, but rather to transfer all of the money and close the account (but you knew that was coming already, didn’t you?). I mentally steeled myself for the inevitable conversation with the customer retentions team and dialled. Only three options on the IVR (good!), of which one was to close an account. After choosing that option, and while I waited to be answered, I mused on the possible reasons why the closure option had such prominence. Part of me hoped  it was in order to get defecting customers to the specialist recovery team as quickly as possible, but my suspicion was that the decision was more prosaic – it was simply happening a lot.

Still, I anticipated some attempt to retain my business; even if only to offer me the current ‘special deal’ for new customers. But no. Nothing. Not even a question as to why I wanted to close the account. In fact, the whole call – from dialling, through holding on for a reply, to having confirmation of the balance being transferred and the date it would get to the  bank – took less time than it has taken you to read this blog post! Super efficient, but a super-wasted opportunity to hear my  perspective on the dumb things being done by this company to their customers.

Photos: courtesy of EpSos.de and Martin Kingsley

customer experience, customer experience design, dumb things, the best service is no service | 1 Comment