Michael MaozTwitter and facebook and social media monitoring are having just about zero effect in improving customer service in the cable business. In fact, one might argue that every moment spent on these efforts is a setback for the customer. Observing cable provider customers and listening to their stories, it would seem more prosaic projects would go a lot further in lowering costs and improving customer satisfaction.
Here is a real-life example this week in New York City, and this is not an example of Cablevision, Comcast or Verizon: Last Monday a woman in Grammercy Park ordered a new cable service for her apartment. She is told that there is availability on Thursday if she can be in her apartment between 2PM and 5PM. Though she is employed and works in an office, she agrees.
Do you already know where this is going? At 5:30 PM on Thursday, there is still no cable installer, and no phone call update, so the woman calls the cable provider (sic!). The service representative says she will check and get back to her. NOT. But around 6PM the woman receives a “Courtesy Call” (sic!) to say that the engineer will arrive at 7:30PM.
Right on time, at 7:30PM, cable guy shows up and does a clean and neat job. But when the woman shuts off her television, her DVR box shuts down as well, cancelling all of her programming. And then upon turning the cable box back on, the unit performs a complete reboot requiring 7 minutes. The woman calls Technical Support but cannot understand the man on the other end of the line. When she asks him to repeat, he hangs up. She calls back, and this time she is told that they will need to send a technician, and their first available slot is for one week later.
Where should this company begin the long journey to earning the respect and trust of customers? Their website is sprayed with banners about ‘deals’ and ‘bundles’ and other pricing information.
But a focus on customer service? Nothing.
Do they display their customer service ratings? No.
Do they show the posts to customer forums? No.
Do they show product reviews? No.
Are their interaction channels connected? Is it easy to track a complaint? Do they know survey every customer to see if their installation went well? Or give them the tools to provide their experience post-installation?
Well, one gets tired of typing ‘no.’
I’ve been visiting towns and states around the Eastern US Seaboard, and something is clear: the smaller the business, the better the service. Privately owned businesses tied to their communities are unflaggingly responsive to customers. But as we scale, the voice of the customer, and the loop back to the customer, fail to hold.
The net of it is: The big “Social CRM” and “Social Media” projects tend to do a good job in capturing abstract comments disconnected from specific events, and this information, as it is on a high level, fails to tie into someones performance review. You might as well shut down these social projects if they are just so much lipstick on the pig (no disrespect to pigs – they’re smarter than your dog!).
Classic Customer Service projects want to look at the customer experiences of individuals as well as aggragates. They create closed loops that track the steps that go into a successful customer experience for each specific customer, and then let the results impact the performance reviews of employees. If your customer is not happy, you won’t be happy. You might even be fired. You’ll certainly lose a bonus or commission or access to a pay increase.
Next time around I want to drill into ways of providing intrinsic rewards for employees – things that allow them to feel true satisfaction in their jobs while at the same time empowering them to succeed.
Right now I’m helping a young woman reconfigure her cable box.
Category: Applications CRM Customer Centric Web Innovation and Customer Experience Leadership Social CRM Social Networking Social Software Strategic Planning Twitter Tags:
3 responses so far ↓
1 Bookmarks for July 14th through July 15th – Social CRM ( SCRM ) Consulting Services | Social CRM World ( SCRM ) July 15, 2010 at 5:07 am
[...] Social Software? Ask your cable provider the connection to CRM. [...]
2 Patrick Murphy July 15, 2010 at 10:24 am
Although I empathize with the experience of your friend and her local cable monopoly, I have a hard time believing that social crm is the right tool to fix this problem. For most of us the services offered by our local cable company are in fact a take it or leave it bundle of services. In some regions there may be a duopoly between the cableco and the telco but there is no real competition for the majority of customers. Thus, social crm does not benefit the cableco or the staff directly affected by this poor business process. Raising the volume of complaints will not fix a bad business process.
We believe there is another way to tackle the problem. All of us can easily identify the many inefficiencies and costs within this one business process. These are costs that are of no benefit to the cableco or any of their staff members stuck within a business process that is terrible. The costs are in employee morale thus poor retention, contact center volume, field staff scheduling, poor use of trucks and other inventory, and ,of course, loss of revenue given there is no ability to upsell this customer.
So, redesign this process so that the Cableco and their staff see real benefits. Automate the scheduling and customer communication from the beginning through the end of this process. This is what communications enabled business process (CEBP) solutions have been focused on with huge successes across many industries. Find the business metric and move it to generate real ROI using CEBP solutions. Let the cableco staff focus on installations and trouble tickets that require real human thought and interactions.
By focusing on building an effective, automated process that quickly shows benefits to the Cable company, the customer experience problems do get solved rapidly.
Patrick Murphy
VoiceSage US
3 Gabriel Gheorghiu July 16, 2010 at 4:04 pm
I do not agree with Patrick and here’s an example which will hopefully explain why: i was looking for a portable air conditioner and the best product at the most reasonable price was sold by company x. You can order online, they deliver, sounds great.
But, before ordering, i googled the company and found some very interesting reviews – hundreds or them were bad or very bad and the word “horrible” was very often associated with “customer service”. The product worked well, but:
- they sometimes didn’t deliver the right product and you had to take the wrong product to a distribution center yourself
- there is no charge for delivery until the last step of the ordering process, when many will probably not cancel even if 30 or 40 dollars are added to the total
- no answers from customer service or on hold for hours or vague promises, etc.
- etc.
I’m not a social media evangelist, but it did save me lots of headaches more than once.