The Customer Service Survey

Answer The Phone Properly or Not At All

Wednesday - December 03, 2008 12:11 PM

Marketing guru Seth Godin recently had a bad experience with a KitchenAid teakettle leaving molten gobs of plastic on his thumb.

This was followed by an almost-as-bad experience trying to call KitchenAid to complain.

Godin's advice: "The only reason to answer the phone when a customer calls is to make the customer happy. If you're not doing this...do not answer the phone."

It sounds anthema to many in the call center business--who view busy signals and no-answers as the worst possible treatment for a caller--but Godin has a point. One thing worse than getting no answer is calling a company, spending ten minutes wading through menus then getting a "our call center is closed" message.

"How Are You?"

Thursday - November 13, 2008 09:37 AM

Photo by maura
licensed under Creative Commons

I'm not sure when or why this happened, but somehow the question "How are you?" has become a surefire tipoff to telemarketing calls.

The script invariably starts like this:

ME: Hello?

CALLER: May I speak to Peter Leppik?

ME: This is.

CALLER: Hello, Mr. Leppik, how are you?

This seemingly-innocuous question is invariably followed by some sort of pitch which I have absolutely no interest in. Legitimate callers (defined as people I actually want to talk to) normally immediately identify themselves (and the company they're calling from) and unambiguously give the reason for the call. None of this scripted awkward friendliness, just right into "This is Bob from Shade Tree Mechanics, and your car is fixed as ready to pick up."

It wouldn't surprise me if this script oddity showed up occasionally, but I'm mystified as to why it seems to happen in every single telemarketing call I get.

It's as though every telemarketing script was written by the same guy, who decided at some point that it was necessary to ask "How are you?" to get past the awkward moment when the called party expects to hear the reason for the call, but the caller won't state the reason because then the called person would hang up.

So instead there's this awkward moment when the telemarketer asks me "How are you?" and I immediately know that I don't want to talk to this person, but I don't yet know why, so I'm forced to answer very tentatively, "Ooooookay."

And then the caller dives into the rest of the script while I hunt for a less-rude moment to hang up.

An Open Letter to My Favorite Airline

Friday - October 31, 2008 12:24 PM

Midwest Airlines has long been my favorite airline, thanks to the extra-comfy seats and hot cookies served on board. Lately they've been going downmarket, though, which has trimmed my enthusiasm for them somewhat.

I can't entirely blame them: running an airline is a tough business these days, and Midwest's options range from bleak to catastrophic. Nevertheless, I'm disappointed that they would choose to dilute what makes their brand unique and try to compete on price just like every other miserable airline out there.

I'm not the only one, as outlined in this letter which concludes "You have chunks in your beer."

Bad Outsourcing Contributes to Fraud

Monday - October 27, 2008 02:22 PM

Consumerist has a scary article today about how incompetent call center outsourcing contributed to consumer fraud. The problem happened when an outsourced security department mistakenly cleared a known fraudster to have access to a customer account.

Many people will undoubtably read this as an indictment of call center outsourcing, but I see it a little differently: the core issue is that the outsourcer was kept on such a short leash that they had to follow the manual even when common sense might dictate otherwise.

So when the fraudster called and was able to answer the handful of security questions (questions which remained the same from call to call), the security department gave him access to the account. This despite warnings that this caller was clearly not the account holder, and notes that the account should not be unfrozen for any reason whatsoever.

When Customer Service Doesn't Matter

Tuesday - October 14, 2008 01:27 PM

Photo by grainofsaltjd
licensed under Creative Commons

It's been hard, I'm sure, for a lot of people to focus on day-to-day life the past few weeks, with the stock markets collapsing, banks getting taken over by the government, and our political leadership (such as it is) warning of dire times to come.

Fortunately for us at VocaLabs, things are going smoothly in our small corner of the economy (knock on wood), and a big client project is keeping us busy enough that we don't feel the need to compulsively refresh Google News to see how bad things are. Our liquid assets have remained liquid, and we have no immediate need to go to a bank and borrow money.

And fortunately for those of us living in the United States, we have an effective system of deposit insurance which guarantees that even if your bank collapses, a good chunk (usually all) of your money is still there.

Some people are not so fortunate. Iceland's bank collapse has apparently taken a lot of European savings down, since bank deposit insurance in Europe is not as uniform or robust as here in the States.

In a Banking Customer's Hierarchy of Needs, customer service definitely takes a lower priority than getting your money back. It's more important to know the deposits are safe than to get superior service than the DMV. Which is good, since at the rate banks are being nationalized, pretty soon it will actually be the DMV which handles our bank accounts.

So here's hoping this mess will be cleared up quickly, so we can go back to complaining that the teller was surly or it took 30 minutes on hold to reach an agent. In the meanwhile, we at VocaLabs aren't planning many sales calls on banks in the near future.

What, exactly, is "Entertainment Shopping"?

Friday - October 03, 2008 01:11 PM

I discovered the most amazing website last night, at least until an enterprising attorney general somewhere decides to shut it down.

The site is Swoopo.com, and offers something they call "Entertainment Shopping," though in my view it's more akin to gambling for plasma TV's. At first glance, it looks a lot like an auction site like eBay: items are for sale, there's a clock ticking down on each item, and you can bid by clicking a big friendly BID button. Each bid increases the price of the item by $0.15, and most items start at just a few cents.

Unlike eBay, however, Swoopo charges $1 for every bid, win or lose. Oh, and bids near the end of an auction add time to the clock, so there's always time for someone to outbid you.

Let's say you see a Nintendo Wii (normally about $250) selling for ten bucks. Even though you have to spend a buck to bid that's not a bad deal, right? So you wait until there's two seconds left on the clock and click BID. You spend $1, the price goes up to $10.15, and the clock resets to fifteen seconds.

Well, there's someone else who already bid on that Wii, and odds are he's watching, and he's already spent at least a dollar on it. Not wanting to lose his buck, he bids again.

Guess what! That Wii now costs $10.30, the clock is back to fifteen seconds, but you're out a buck. But since $10.30 is still a great price for a Wii, you bid again. And now you're into that Wii for two dollars, win or lose.

As the price goes up, the bidders have more and more invested in the item for sale, and are more and more motivated to not lose. This plays on a well-known tendency for people to go to irrational lengths to avoid a financial loss. Some items actually wind up selling for more than what they would cost in a store, and even if the nominal price is less than retail, some "winning" bidders spend more than retail by the time all the losing bids are counted.

Since Swoopo keeps all the money from everyone's bids, they make money if the final price is more than about 15% of retail. If that $250 Wii is above $37.50, Swoopo is actually selling it for more than retail if you include the price of the bids.

It's an amazing bit of financial engineering, specifically designed to use our cognitive biases to generate huge profits. I have to admire it as a tour de force of applied behavioral economics.

The reason I think this is more like gambling than shopping is because the "winner" of any given item is essentially random. There's very little skill involved, it's more like a game of financial chicken where the last one to run out of money (or give up) wins. I'm not enough of an expert on gaming laws to know if Swoopo actually meets the legal definition of gambling, but this hardly seems like any kind of bargain to me.

Error Handling

Tuesday - September 30, 2008 02:04 PM

One of the hot topics among the people who design speech recognition systems is what is the best way to handle errors. Errors are inevitable, after all, and dealing with them gracefully can make the difference between a good customer experience and a bad one.

I don't know what the best way to handle errors is, but I'm fairly confident that this recording has to be the worst (via Daily WTF).

Reading the Question

Wednesday - September 24, 2008 01:19 PM

There's not doing any usability testing, and then there's the occasional situation where you wonder, "Did the guy who designed this ever even try to use it himself?"

Today's example, from the Daily WTF, is a screenshot from what looks like an ATM or similar transaction kiosk. The screen asks, "DEBIT OR CREDIT?"

The buttons are labeled YES, NO, HELP, CANCEL, CLEAR, ENTER, and the digits 0-9.

I've also seen surveys with questions like:

How satisfied were you with your experience?

• Yes
• No

The unfortunate thing about embarrassing situations like these is that they are immediately obvious as soon as anyone looks at it with fresh eyes. When you see something like this in a production situation, it means that nobody did even the most rudimentary testing or proofreading.

I'm no saint in this regard: I've written plenty of head-scratching draft survey questions. Usually it's someone else who catches the problem (and fortunately, so far, before the survey is finalized). It can be easy to develop a blind spot to your own mistakes, so eve if you don't do any usability testing, at least ask your buddy to take a look. It can save a lot of embarrassment.

Security vs. Convenience

Tuesday - September 16, 2008 02:39 PM

There's often a tradeoff between security and convenience: the more secure you make a system, the less convenient it becomes.

For companies which deal with the public this can become a major issue. Too little security means fraud, identity theft, and legal liability. Too little convenience means customers go elsewhere.

Unfortunately there's no optimal solution yet, and no standard way of doing things. Every company seems to have its own unique security scheme.

Today I had to call American Express for the first time in about two years. After entering my account number, I was prompted to enter my "password."

Apparently American Express accounts now have passwords, but I'll be darned if I could remember setting one. I tried one of the passwords I use on a lot of different accounts, but it didn't work. As a result, the customer service rep asked me a question about public records in my name (in this case the car I own). He then gave me the option of setting a new password or using one of the standard "What is your mother's maiden name" type questions.

Neither option is terribly appealing. I'm quite certain that by the time I need to call American Express again I will have forgotten any password I choose (and I'm not going to write it on the back of my card with a Sharpie). On the other hand, the standard security questions are all well-known and easy for someone else to learn the answer to: there's little security in your mother's maiden name, the city of your birth, or your spouse's birthday.

In the end I chose to set a new password, figuring that I'll just have to go through the forgot-my-password routine again the next time I call.

Really, though, isn't there a better way?

90% of Success

Tuesday - September 09, 2008 01:53 PM

As the saying goes, 90% of success is just showing up. Translated to customer service, you might say that 90% of good service is simple competence. Most of the biggest consumer complaints amount to a failure to do the basics, like answer the phone, provide correct information about products and services, etc.

So with that extremely tenuous connection to the topic of this blog, here's a web site you'll be giggling over all day: Cake Wrecks. Imagine ordering a clown cake for your six-year-old's birthday party. On the big day, with all the kids eagerly awaiting their treat, you open the box and discover Mortis, the Dead Clown.

Or your entire department is gathered by HR for the annual review of company policies, and the boss decides to get a cake decorated to celebrate the occasion.

So enjoy, just try to get some work done the rest of the day.

Nice Going: RyanAir Intentionally Disrupts Thousands of Travel Plans

Friday - August 08, 2008 02:27 PM

Ultra-cheap European airline RyanAir has apparently had a longstanding feud with third party websites which sell plane tickets. RyanAir wants everyone to book their tickets through its own website, so RyanAir can try to sell higher margin services like hotel rooms, rental cars, etc. Their business model is apparently to sell the plane tickets as a deep loss leader, then make it up by selling other stuff to passengers.

The latest move by RyanAir is to cancel all plane tickets booked through third party websites, refunding the airfares to the websites (and forcing the websites to figure out how to process the thousands of individual refunds). One estimate is that this amounts to tens of thousands of tickets, and in the words of RyanAir's CEO, "We want to cause as much chaos for the [websites] as possible."

Apparently the third-party sales of RyanAir tickets are perfectly legal and there's nothing RyanAir can do (legally or technically) to stop them. On the other hand, RyanAir has built a business model which depends on having complete control of the customer transaction, and without the upsale opportunities the company loses money on every ticket sold.

I'm not sure what to make of this dispute (other than to say it is likely to be very entertaining for those of us not planning any travel on RyanAir). I have a hard time seeing how this will help the airline in the long-term or short-term. Even though RyanAir already has a reputation as the ultimate no-frills (i.e. miserable) flying experience, arbitrarily canceling the travel plans of tens of thousands of customers as a way to punish the third-party websites seems little short of suicidal. It's never a good reason to drag innocent third parties into a commercial dispute, especially when those third parties are your customers.

Awesome app, but what about service?

Wednesday - August 06, 2008 02:12 PM

I love Google's online applications. I use Google Calendar all the time, I use Google Spreadsheets to track our home energy usage, I have a Gmail account. Google can make my web browser sing in ways I never thought possible.

But apparently Google hasn't yet figured out that producing a great application and providing great support are two different things--or so Nick Saber learned recently when Google mistakenly disabled his account.

For Nick this was not a small thing, since he couldn't get into his office's instant messaging system, he couldn't access his e-mail, and he couldn't get to his family photos.

This kind of problem should be treated as critical, especially for a premium (paying) customer like Nick. Google apparently has a little work to do in this direction, since the only response Nick got to his repeated e-mails (the only kind of support he could find) was:

Thank you for your report. We've completed our investigation. Because our investigation was inconclusive, we are unable to return your account at this time. At Google we take the privacy and security of our users very seriously. For this reason, we're unable to reveal any further information about this account.

As it turns out, Google does offer phone support for premium customers, but will only give you the special phone number if you're logged in--not much help if the entire problem is that your account has been blocked for no apparent reason.

This story does have a happy ending, in that Nick did eventually get back into his account. It took many different e-mails to many different support addresses until someone pointed him to a web page where he could submit a form asking for access to his account. There are two lessons here: one is that it's not enough to have a great application, there will always be problems in the "real world" and support is important. The second is that you shouldn't use a great application for important stuff (stuff you care about if you lose) unless you can get great support--because sooner or later something will go wrong, and you want some place to turn for help.

Delta Cancels Three of Four Tickets for No Reason

Thursday - July 31, 2008 01:55 PM

Michael Froomkin, who writes the Discourse.net blog, is traveling with his family this week to Manchester, UK. Somehow, Delta Airlines cancelled three of the four return tickets for his family without any apparent reason and no notice.

This led, as you might imagine, to unwanted end-of-vacation stress and more than a little anger towards Delta. It doesn't help things any that all the alternate flights back to the United States are apparently overbooked. As of this writing, he's still stewing on the other side of the pond, and while Delta has promised to get his family home tomorrow, but Froomkin is understandably skeptical.

The true test of customer service is how a company handles things when something goes wrong. Nobody is perfect, and mistakes will happen, but in this case the system seems to have broken down completely.

Good luck, Michael. If you're still in the Manchester airport in a couple days, we'll send you a care package.

Add this to the list of reasons to provide good customer service

Monday - June 23, 2008 02:03 PM

There are lots of reasons to focus on providing good customer service: customer loyalty, higher perceived value, employee morale, etc.

To that list we can add something new, thanks to Comcast: avoiding the risk that your call center employees will document all your service problems, then leak it to a website read by millions of your customers.

Consolidation

Friday - May 23, 2008 02:30 PM

One of the most frustrating things, from a consumer perspective, is that even when you make a point of choosing a company based on the customer service, after a few years they get acquired and the service level gets flushed down into the sewer.

Will The Airline Industry Put Itself Out of Business with Bad Service?

Friday - April 11, 2008 02:11 PM

Yesterday, I took a sympathetic view towards all the American Airlines employees who are put in the miserable position today of trying to deal with the hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded by American's maintenance issues (which have--so far--cancelled over 3,000 flights this week).

Today's Funny Tech Support Stories

Thursday - April 03, 2008 01:31 PM

Every now and then it's good to step back from the consumer horror stories about bad service and share some stories from the other side of the phone.

As if wedding planning wasn't stressful enough....

Wednesday - April 02, 2008 02:40 PM

It's been a long time since I got married, but I was always under the impression that part of the point of the preparations and what-not is to make every bride feel like she gets to be a princess for a short while. Of course, some brides take this too far (hence the "Bridezilla" phenomenon).

How Not To Sell Stuff Over the Phone

Friday - February 15, 2008 01:39 PM

$550 in bank fees for a free upgrade

Monday - January 14, 2008 07:40 PM