The Customer Service Survey
VocaLabs' weblog providing news and commentary on the challenges of providing good customer service.
Billing for Bad Service
Wednesday - February 07, 2007 03:53 PM in
One of my persistent bad-customer-service fantasies is to bill companies for my time when they make me wait for service. As in, "I'm the CEO of a company which measures customer service quality, and we normally bill our consulting time at $500/hour. You made me wait on hold for 20 minutes, so I'll be sending you a bill for $166, along with my report on how to improve your customer service and reduce hold times."
So far this has remained just a fantasy, not least because I'd hate to put the poor (and probably overworked) customer service agent on the spot like that.
Nevertheless, Mongtomery County, MD has done something similar by fining Comcast for poor customer service. According to this document, the county is charging Comcast about $12,000 for consistently failing to meet its service level promise of answering the phone within 30 seconds 90% of the time.
I've got three reactions to this.
First, $12,000 isn't nearly enough to convince Comcast to improve service. That's less than the cost of a single additional customer service rep, so it would probably cost Comcast more to merely study the problem (much less fix it) than pay the fine.
Second, 30 seconds to answer 90% of the time isn't that ambitious a goal, especially since they're allowed to exclude events beyond Comcast's control. So if they experience a surge in call volume because of a big storm, they don't have to count that time.
Finally, Montgomery County is letting Comcast report its own statistics, measured as Comcast sees fit. If Comcast can't meet this relatively modest service goal, despite being able to exclude times when external events cause calls to back up, and despite being able to calculate the metric any way they want (presumably Comcast chooses the most favorable method)....someone inside Comcast just isn't paying much attention.
Still, sticking Comcast with a fine for bad service, however modest, it at least a step in the right direction.
Posted by Peter Leppik
Nevertheless, Mongtomery County, MD has done something similar by fining Comcast for poor customer service. According to this document, the county is charging Comcast about $12,000 for consistently failing to meet its service level promise of answering the phone within 30 seconds 90% of the time.
I've got three reactions to this.
First, $12,000 isn't nearly enough to convince Comcast to improve service. That's less than the cost of a single additional customer service rep, so it would probably cost Comcast more to merely study the problem (much less fix it) than pay the fine.
Second, 30 seconds to answer 90% of the time isn't that ambitious a goal, especially since they're allowed to exclude events beyond Comcast's control. So if they experience a surge in call volume because of a big storm, they don't have to count that time.
Finally, Montgomery County is letting Comcast report its own statistics, measured as Comcast sees fit. If Comcast can't meet this relatively modest service goal, despite being able to exclude times when external events cause calls to back up, and despite being able to calculate the metric any way they want (presumably Comcast chooses the most favorable method)....someone inside Comcast just isn't paying much attention.
Still, sticking Comcast with a fine for bad service, however modest, it at least a step in the right direction.
Posted by Peter Leppik
Posted at 03:53 PM by | | | |