Every company is talking about customer experience, and has been investing heavily in customer service for years. Yet recent experience tells me that, in some cases, customer service has never been so bad. Or, to be more precise, that when something goes wrong, it quickly spirals out of control.
And for once, instead of a purely managerial and organizational approach, this post will be based on a real-life story which, moreover, touches me very closely and which you will see should have its place in the pantheon of customer service horrors.
The root of the problem: we’ve never been better equipped to serve the customer
Companies have never been so well equipped and organized to serve their customers, and we can understand this by looking at the sector that interests us today: Telcos.
This approach to progress began in its infancy in the 80s, grew in the 90s, and entered a new dimension in the 2000s, with a continuous acceleration that leaves us wondering when it will reach its climax.
I would say that this approach rests on three pillars: specialization, outsourcing and digitalization.
Specialization means that within the company, the customer is taken in hand by specialized departments, with a clear disappearance of versatility and a dispersal of responsibility.
The most visible aspect is that of the retail stores. From now on, you’ll find nothing but sales representatives who are not content to simply sell, but to provide real value-added advice. On the other hand, don’t rely on them if you have the slightest problem. They’ll help you set up your phone, but don’t expect much more than that. The person who sold you something then has no power over what happens to your use of the service, despite their best efforts.
Customer service, on the other hand, is in the hands of another department. And that’s a good thing: these are professionals who have experience of just about everything that can happen to you, and therefore have the knowledge and skills to understand and resolve any problem.
On the other hand, they’re anonymous. Available on the phone, by chat, on social networks, you’ll never see them, never know their name, and for them you’re ticket #xxxxx and nothing else. There’s little or no follow-up, and if you call back you’ll get a new person to whom you’ll have to explain everything all over again.
And if you need a service call? They’ll send you a technician who, more often than not, works for a subcontractor.
The next logical step after specialization is outsourcing. Since the customer is cut up into small pieces in the hands of specialized departments, why not outsource those that don’t correspond to the core business?
So Telcos have concentrated on their core business: innovation, product development, marketing and infrastructure development and management.
As a result, all or part of the technical side of the business (on-site interventions at customer sites) has been outsourced, and customer service has been shifted to call centers that are sometimes no longer managed by the operator itself.
This logic, which some people seem to be discovering today, was in fact pushed by the major strategy consultancies and service providers charged with implementing it, with the promise that it would help reduce costs, focus on core business, be more operationally flexible and provide access to specific expertise.
And finally, the third pillar is digitalization, which has enabled us to move faster and on a larger scale on the previous two pillars. Sophisticated CRMs can theoretically provide a unified view of the customer across the various departments he is dealing with; omnichannel offers customers diversified channels for contacting customer service; self-service enables customers to solve problems themselves without having to call on customer service; and automation and AI enable greater speed and availability.
In conclusion, we’ve never had so many experts hyper-specialized in their field, and so many technologies that enable us to better understand, follow and serve the customer.
Well, in theory, because in practice we’re going to see that not only is the promise not kept, but the system is incapable of handling exceptions. Everything is done to optimize customer service, but if at some point something goes wrong, nobody knows what to do, or even who is responsible.
You could even say that it’s all the factors that are supposed to make the customer experience ideal that can totally and irretrievably derail it.
So let’s begin our little story…. with the findings and lessons we’ve learned along the way.
Step 1: an ideal shopping experience
It all began 10 months ago. With ADSL at the end of its useful life, a very elderly lady decided to switch to fiber. Knowing absolutely nothing about it, and being very uncomfortable with all things digital, she asked her son for advice.
As he was very satisfied with his carrier, he recommended it to her. It’s a good thing she has her fixed and mobile lines there, so all she has to do is cancel her cable TV subscription and switch over.
For the sake of decency, and in view of what follows, we’ll call this carrier Yellow…
He takes advantage of a weekend when he’s visiting her to accompany her to the nearest Yellow branch. At this point, he thinks he’s doing her a favor , without imagining that he’s about to put her in a situation that will push her nervous resistance to the limit and even affect her health.
The customer advisor is very friendly, advises her and optimizes her offer, so that in the end she pays much less than before.
She does, however, suggest additional services that correspond to the needs of this type of customer and suggests that the son recommend them to his mother. Although convinced of their relevance, he prefers to wait until the fiber is installed and says they’ll see later. This is important for the future.
An appointment is made for the installation.
Step 2: fiber installation (1), a series of glitches
On the day the fiber was to be installed, the son came all the way from Paris to supervise and ensure that everything was properly connected and configured.
A technician, employed by a Yellow subcontractor we’ll call MessyCo, arrives and realizes that Yellow’s people have forgotten to make a connection somewhere on their infrastructure.
The intervention was cancelled, but rescheduled once Yellow had made the connection.
A few weeks later, the customer is informed that MessyCo will be able to intervene 15 days later.
On the day in question, the son makes the trip again, and here we go again. Yellow still hadn’t made the connection, so the intervention was cancelled.
A few weeks later, a new intervention is scheduled.
The son, to whom the advisor had given his personal mobile number (because in theory a customer is not assigned to an advisor, but since she wanted to make an additional sale….), calls her to inform her of the situation. She’s sympathetic, but of course there’ s nothing she can do to make sure the job gets done– it’s out of her hands.
Lesson no. 1: there’s no ownership of the subject. One person is supposed to make a connection, another to intervene once it’s done, but nobody controls anything, and MessyCo largely passes the buck to Yellow.
Stage 3: fiber installation (2), the catastrophe
The son makes another trip for what he hopes will be the last attempt.
The technician comes back and finds that…the connection still hasn’t been made by Yellow. But he says he “can try to do something”. In short, at the cost of an intervention the nature of which the customer will not understand, the installation can begin.
The fiber has to be brought from the stairwell into the apartment. A seemingly trivial task that we’ve all had to face, and one that should be a mere formality.
He analyzes the situation and is informed that there are pipes, so he’ll have to drill high up. No sooner does the customer turn his head than he drills into a heating pipe and water starts gushing into the room.
The customer starts to panic, tears welling up in her eyes as she realizes: it’s the end of winter and we’ re going to have to turn off the hot water, and therefore the heating.
The workman reassures her that everything will be fixed in the evening.
In the evening, the makeshift repair doesn’t work: the wall is ripped open, the carpet unsalvageable.
The son says he will contact Yellow and the insurance company. The technician tells him not to do anything about it: he’ll be back on Monday with more workmen. The son disagrees, but the customer doesn’t have the strength or inclination to get into a confrontational relationship, so they wait until Monday.
Monday no news. Tuesday neither, despite messages left on the technician’s mobile.
Things are getting tough.
Lesson 2: service providers don’t follow the operator’s quality standards , and don’t want the operator to know about their mistakes. The promise of specialization is not kept.
Lesson 3: The client does not audit the work of his subcontractors. Otherwise, all the comments left online by customers who have dealt with MessyCo should have triggered an audit and an investigation on his part, at the very least.
Step 4: Yellow customer service denies responsibility
The son returns to Paris and decides to take matters into his own hands. He calls Yellow customer service on the phone.
The conversation is brief:
“There’s a leak, the wall was gutted to repair it, the repair doesn’t work and your mother no longer has heating or hot water? ”
“Yes” (to be exact it was the truth except for one detail, the bathroom having its own hot water tank had hot water. But no hot water anywhere else, and no heating).
“But does the fiber work?”.
“Yes”.
“I can’t do anything for us,our job is to get the fiber working and the rest is not our concern. Goodbye sir”.
Lesson 4: Customer service is either unaware of its responsibility, or pretends not to be, so that the customer has to fend for himself. Here again, there is a failure to apply quality standards.
Step 5: Contact is forcibly established
Lost for lost, the son decides to move up a gear.
He posts a message on the Yellow customer service forums and on Twitter.
He gets a reply within the day and is told that an appointment will be made with someone from customer relations very shortly. This was arranged for the following morning.
He then talks to someone we’ll call Gertrude.
Gertrude listens to him, tells him that the answer he’d received the day before was shameful, and that she was taking matters into her own hands, would be his sole contact and would keep him informed of further developments.
She gives him her email (but an anonymous one, with only her first name on it) and, of course, no phone number.
She can reach him in any way she likes, but he can only write to her if she deigns to read and answer… which won’t last.
For all intents and purposes, he informs the store’s sales representative, who is visibly touched by the situation but can do nothing about it other than talk to her store manager (which will achieve nothing, if anything), but can’t hide her disappointment at not being able to conclude her sale of additional services.
Lesson 5: technology has dehumanized customer relations, which have lost their human touch.
Lesson 6: by turning so called advisors into salespeople, they’ve been stripped of all power and even interest in a quality customer relationship.
A week later Gertrude calls back: Yellow will of course assume full responsibility for the matter, their insurance will pay and they’ll send someone to understand and resolve the situation.
Step 6: The realm of confusion
Some time later, another company contacts the customer. It has been mandated by Yellow to assess the situation and take the necessary action.
Several interlocutors try to find a solution, from a distance of course. They were also unable to find a plumber to give an estimate.
And then one day, an intervention is scheduled.
Lesson 7: each person is responsible for a small part of the file, pushing forward his or her own small part of the process, but nobody has a global vision, and the customer doesn’t know who to talk to… when someone deigns to answer. We can’t say that the promises of outsourcing have been kept.
To the customer’s surprise, the workman who had caused the leak arrived.
A new repair is carried out, but it won’t last any longer than the previous one: water continues to leak slowly but surelyfrom the pipe.
At this stage, it’s late spring and the situation has been going on for 4 months.
The son tries to contact Gertrude again, but she never replies to his e-mails. A new attempt in October was no more fruitful.
As for the many service providers and interveners who have succeeded one another, not one of them gets back in touch or responds when the customer tries to contact them.
Lesson 8: the multiplication of interlocutors and the dehumanization of the relationship make things impossible to follow for the customer. Is this intentional, or is it the same at Yellow, who think that processes and tools will do everything without making people responsible?
Step 7: Insurance companies do no better than Telco
The picture would not be complete if insurance hadn’t joined the party.
The customer filed a claim with her insurance company. To preserve her reputation, we’ll call her the MOUF.
Of course, it all starts with a robot on the phone , because the agencies only deal with the commercial side of things, and don’t accompany the customer through the claims process.
Lesson 9: in addition to dehumanizing customer relations, excessive digitalization is making life impossible for many people, especially those who are not very comfortable with digital technology. But they’re not the only ones: anyone who has ever had to battle with a robot that takes your call knows what we’re talking about.
A person in who knows where ends up calling back, and here again, the number of interlocutors multiplies, always at a distance. After a few weeks, one of them says there’s no reason to compensate anything. Have they contacted Yellow’s insurance company, which Gertrude said would pay? We don’t know.
The summer has passed and everyone seems to have lost interest in the case.
It’s 7 months later and the client still has a leaking heating pipe as winter sets in. She has two options: get cold, or turn on the heating and risk aggravating the deterioration of the wall, which is already quite visible.
[UPDATE]: the lady has since been hospitalized (for a different reason) but the nursing staff noted that this heating problem was problematic at this stage of the year and that being totally left to fend for herself was a source of mental pain and stress.
They contacted a social worker who called a contact at Yellow. The said contact said he had an internal person to call to discuss the matter. Finally he called the assistant back and said “my internal contact didn’t want to talk about the subject and hung up on me”.
Thanks Yellow!
Everything went perfectly and that’s the problem
The real problem is that, in this story, everything went perfectly except for one detail.
The advisor sold, the installer installed, customer service referred the case to other experts for action.
But two things went wrong in this carefully thought-out organization.
1°) The sub-contractor who drilled a pipe and tried to repair his mistake behind Yellow’s back.
2°) The customer service department, which initially refused to assume its responsibilities.
The customer was able to bypass the system to compensate for the second, but the first was a real sticking point.
That said, everyone played their part perfectly, within the limits of their scope, and passed the ball to others while waiting for a return.
It would be easy to pick on the people here (apart from the worker and the first customer service person), but as is often the case, it’s the system that’s to blame (The Problem Isn’t the Employee, It’s the System). Once again, we have proof that, despite the official rhetoric, the customer is not “at the center”. What is central is the process, the task.
The customer is not the center of attention, but the center of trouble.
What is “at the center” for each of the parties involved?
For the salesperson, it’s the sale, because even if she feels concerned about creating a relationship of trust, she has no power.
For the technician, what counts is the connection, no matter what the price, even if it means making a mistake, even if it means hiding the error and trying to manage on his own.
For the first person in customer service, the objective is to reduce the potential costs of the service and the company’s exposure.
For the online person, the aim is to protect the company’s reputation by getting the customer to stop bringing up the subject online.
For the customer relations “specialist”, the objective is to solve the problem, i.e. to stop a leak (the collateral damage has never even been mentioned). To do this, she mobilizes subcontractors while waiting for their feedback, and then moves on to other things.
For the subcontractors, the aim is to stop the leak , but by dragging it out as long as possible, and in any case, it’s just a leak.
Connection, leak, file, sale…where’s the customer? Everyone has rationally pursued their assigned objectives within the framework of a system, because the system is not designed for the customer.
If we put the customer at the center, we wouldn’t say “the connection’s working, but there’s a leak and the customer’s starting to bother us again” but:
“There’s an 89-year-old lady, frail, not at ease with digital channels, who spent one winter in the cold and is now preparing for a second, who has become physically and mentally ill, feels that no one contacts her or wants to talk to her, ends up thinking that her weakness is being abused , and is on the verge of breaking down from talking to walls”.
The real nature of the problem is not technical but human, and obviously no one thought that installing fiber could cause human distress.
Same situation, different point of view, and certainly not the same way of solving the problem.
And we wouldn’t even be surprised to learn that the various stakeholders are very affected by this situation, but that they can’t do anything about it , even if it’s frustrating for them (Companies are not omnichannel at all! Irritant #10 of the employee experience)
“First of all, the customer, sausaged and sliced up according to the different points of contact, lives a disjointed experience that has nothing fluid about it. Secondly, and this is our problem, the employee in charge of the customer, whether he or she is a salesperson in the store, works in marketing or is in charge of the loyalty program, often has no way of reconciling the data and therefore having a relevant action based on complete information.”
Yes, omnichannel is all about marketing and pestering customers, not serving them.
Exception handling at the heart of the problem
Designing a system that performs well in terms of both delivery and cost is commendable, and even desirable, as long as it can handle exceptions.
This may seem obvious, but it never happens by chance. To achieve this, at some point you have to give the power back to the human being over the system , and trust him. Quite the opposite of the hyper-rational approaches we’re talking about.
To achieve this, we need to be aware of the possible impact of these exceptions, and understand that a technical problem for some generates human distress for others.
But (Employees must follow the processes. Are you sure?) when an intelligent way of looking at things would be to design processes that serve the employee who serves the customers have done just the opposite and “”.. .over the last 40-50 years, operations management has been mainly based on operations research, where everything tends to be modeled mathematically. Modeling generally reduces human beings to variables in equations.”
Bottom line
If I’d wanted to write a post on the evils of outsourcing and over-specialization in customer service, you’d have said I was pushing things a bit too far.
The problem is that this case, real and unsolved to this day, is worse than the worst-case scenario I could have imagined.
When I raised the subject with friends, everyone was unanimous in blaming the firms that made a lot of money by leading their clients into this kind of impasse, but that’s not my opinion.
These firms, which I respect a lot, have an objective, and I don’t think the question the Telcos asked them was “maximize the customer experience” but rather “reduce our costs”.
The rest just follows as the result of implacable logic.
But all’s well, fiber works.
