Michael MaozI received my first cable bill at my new home. There were about 28 line items over three pages and two columns. Who’s on first? I already had had the run around during installation when cable guy left the house without turning on the internet and leaving me to make four calls and finally hacking into the engineer section of the site to turn it on myself. (ok, maybe not quite.) But now came an inscrutable bill with a couple of fees I was sure my original sales person had said were part of the ‘new package.’
The good news was that the customer service number was right on the bill. except that it is all spelled out in letters rather than numbers and my mobile device doesn’t match up numbers and letters on the keys. I felt like Matt Damon’s character, Colin, in the film The Departed typing blindly into his mobile phone, hoping I could match the alphanumerics. Tata: success! The customer service rep was very friendly. I told him my situation. He suggested he would email the sales person to ask him what he recalled offering me. I politely asked him: “What did you have for breakfast on June 19th?” and I think that startled him. “Excuse me, sir?” Well, I said, I am doubting whether a sales person who made me an offer seven weeks ago for a package with this many components will recall the offer. It’s like asking you what you had for breakfast six weeks ago.
My very polite service agent asked if I would like to dispute the charge and change the service plan. I had a simple suggestion: why not open the voice recording of our conversation? I didn’t want to dispute anything – I heard the message back then, “This call is recorded for quality assurance purposes.” So: just click on the .WAV file and we can both listen to the conversation together.
“um. We only record calls at random, and we don’t associate them with any customer record.”
My question is: why not? They obviously have tens and tens of millions of dollars to pay actors to yuck it up, or use their sex appeal in television commercials, so why not spend a fraction of that on their existing technologies? Why force the customer into a “dispute?”
Sometimes the simple, customer-centric approach to customer service and customer experience may do more than the brute force of marketing, and I think this may be one of them.
Comments Off
Category: CRM Customer Centric Web Innovation and Customer Experience Tags:
