Customer Service – Levelling with customers

From Nirvana ...

As a customer of a traditional telco my broadband was turned on 6 years ago, has been upgraded three times from 512kbits to 8 megabits, and I have had no more than 20 seconds of service interruption. Any issues I have had with fixing the configuration of the supplied wireless router and broadband phone have been fixed promptly and to my satisfaction.

I naively thought broadband was like this everywhere ...

Well it appears that there are still pockets of ‘the customer is always wrong’.

To Hell...

Imagine my surprise when I visited a relative in SE Asia to discover his cable provider had been giving him the run around for over a month with intermittent and severe internet service issues. The response was ‘connect the PC directly to the Cable Modem (CM) and if that works go and buy a new wireless router’.

Well the PC didn’t work when connected to the CM.

So when we went back the help desk they told him to connect the PC to the CM and if that worked buy a new router! It transpired they were unable to correlate the new call with the previous call, nor the calls, and emails from the daughter over the previous month - not so much a 360 degree view but a 1 degree view of the customer.

Eventually after much threatening the helpful repair guy comes round and quickly diagnoses the Cable Modem has a sync problem.

You might think one happy customer. Well NO.

Even though the CM and the Router were supplied by the company it seems that the CM and the router is actually the customer’s after the initial contract,  so you have to buy a new one’s if they goes wrong - But if you didn’t extend the contract, but took out another contract you would have got a new CM and router.

Was the really helpful repair guy empowered to up-sell to the customer at this critical moment? – Well NO, after much threatening he offered a refurbished CM.

Do we have a happy customer experience here?

Well NO.  One stressed out customer is thinking of going somewhere else when the contract renewal comes up in four months.

Does it have to be like this?

NO. Any company can improve the customer experience by taking an outside in view of their engagements with the customer and seeing every contact as an opportunity to improve Customer Experience.

The recently produced TMF Technical Reports TR148 and TR 149 Managing Customer Experience  <<Web URL>> give some pointers about how Service Providers can provide and intentional Customer Experience and TR 152 Managing the Quality of Customer Experience http://www.tmforum.org/cws/view_folder.aspx?SelectedIndex=1&team_ID=246&ID=5638 gives a overview of the available technologies to implement improved Customer Experience.