Customer service is worse than ever; what can be done about it?

Customer service has definitely become worse than ever, and it's now started to affect the bottom line of companies. In a study done in August of 2006, it was discovered that nearly half of US consumers stopped doing business with a company within the last year due to poor customer service. Ouch.

If you are in a company and are interested in making improvements in your customer service, you must first put yourself in the position of the customer before you can fix the problem. We have all experienced horrible customer service, so it shouldn't be too difficult to figure out what bothers customers. It boils down to three basic complaint areas: automation, offshoring, and incompetence.

Rise of the Machines
Automated customer self-service systems are called IVRs (interactive voice responders) in the industry, and they can be as simple as offering different numbered prompts to connect to the right department, or might incorporate sophisticated voice recognition systems (which I call the phone robot). Have you noticed that these automated systems are becoming even more cumbersome? Now, if you call a customer service number for the average company, there are 9 options that you have to listen to before you can even get to the next step (which has 9 more options). If you make a grave error and forget to jot down the options that might come close to your problem, then you have to press * or # and listen to them all over again. And to add insult to injury, now the automated systems remind you in at least 3 or 4 very long and s-l-o-w sentences that you could also go their websites for help (which you probably did already and that's why you are calling!!)

Then there are the voice recognition systems, and you have to talk to the phone robot that never even provides the right option that fits your problem. So you say something like, "No, you idiot!" and the robot responds, "Sorry, I didn't get that. Are you requesting information for award travel or reservations?" And you were calling to just change your seat assignment. One solution is to keep pressing "0" for operator, but some systems won't even let you do that and the phone robot gets a little upset: "Sorry, that's an incorrect option." At this point, you are ready to drive to the corporate headquarters several times zones away to go and strangle the CEO.

Automated systems were put into place by companies to improve customer satisfaction; they in fact have had the opposite effect. In the August 2006 study mentioned above, 57% of the respondents felt that these new technologies weren't helping service levels.

Brandon and Buffy from Bangalore
Unless you've been living in a cave the last five years or so, you've probably had many opportunities to converse with the good people of India, hired by large US companies to field customer support calls, especially those for technical support. Offshoring has been sold to companies as a great way to shave expenses while making a respectable contribution to further the global economy. Never mind the impact to the US workforce and economy, but I digress. Complaints about the poor customer service from offshore call centers have been so extensive that early movers such as Dell decided to pull tech support back into the US for their large business customers (we poor consumers or small business owners still have to deal with Brandon and Buffy in Bangalore). The problem is one of communication; we Americans speak American English and Indians speak British English (often as a second language) and talk very fast with different intonation. I have to ask them to slow down and repeat what they're saying several times before I can understand what they are saying. It's very time-consuming and is a waste of my time and theirs. And what adds insult to injury is when the Indian customer service reps use Americanized names to make it sound like they're in America. That really ticks me off. I know they're in India anyway, so if you must tell me your name, use your real one!

It's also a two-way conversation, so the problem is even bigger. Indian workers often have problems understanding Americans to be able to respond or carry on their side of the conversation, especially if English is their second language. They may not understand the meaning of slang words or acronyms that we toss around with ease.

Just Re-install Windows; No Problem!
Incompetence is another major issue; 66% of respondents from the August 2006 study were frustrated by the rep's inability to answer questions or resolve their problem. Many customer support centers do not adequately train their reps, or instead provide them with standard 'scripts' that might solve the most frequent problems. If your problem doesn't fit their script, they may have you go through all the steps anyway (including removing Windows from your PC!) and reinstalling it. They do this because they have no other information to give you, and there's no one else around to solve the problem. If a rep starts taking you down a path that doesn't sound right, then you might stop and question why, or tell them you already did that step (especially important when it comes to computer problems - you don't want to crash your computer and lose your data).

In a revealing story published at www.ConsumerAffairs.com, a journalist visited an Indian call center, and watched as 50 customer service reps were playing computer games while talking to customers from a script, reading steps from the script until a customer hung up the phone (at which point the rep was pleased). There are also cultural differences between India and America, as the article points out, and Indians do not really demand or expect what we Americans call customer service. Therefore, the workers are trained to answer phones and follow a script and bring no other skills to the job (such as creatively troubleshooting a problem over the phone with the customer in order to truly solve a problem). Now I understand what really goes on at the other end!

What to Do: Consumers
As a consumer, take action. There is an interesting website called Get Human (www.gethuman.com) that provides shortcuts through the automated phone systems to reach live humans, and they do this for more than 500 companies. That will help you navigate through to hopefully get a live person. If you're not satisfied, complain to the next level up until you get a satisfactory response, even it you have to go to CEO. And if you don't get to talk to someone and instead end up in a circular phone loop, then stop doing business with the company and write a letter telling them why. And finally, do what you say you will do. DON'T do business with the company any more, and tell your friends, too. There are at least three major companies whose technology products I won't buy again, ever. I've had to actually toss out thousands of dollars worth of technology because the customer service couldn't or wouldn't fix the problems.

What to Do: Companies
For your own company, it's very simple: provide the level of customer service you would like to receive. Instead of automated systems, use humans as the "first responders" to answer the phone, who can them intelligently direct calls to where they need to go. Bring in the automated systems later in the process flow. If you must do offshoring and there is no alternative, then provide adequate training to reps, especially how to do creative troubleshooting. And please have reps use their real names!

If you are a new or startup company: before implementing your customer service infrastructure, survey your customers and make sure that their expectations will be met. If you are an established company, send surveys out to your customers, listen to the feedback, and act on it. If you don't, you will quickly become part of the new trend of customers taking their business elsewhere.