Tag Archives: Customer service

June 15, 2015 · 10:53 am

Too Big To Care

More bad publicity for the folks at United Airlines over the weekend.  This time, a mechanical issue in-flight resulted in a plane full of passengers having to spend the night in a military barracks.  Obviously there was no issue with the need to land the plane – who wants to be 6 miles up with a mechanical issue?  But what happened next is yet another black eye on United’s record of customer care.

English: United Airlines Boeing B747-400 at Be...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What company needs this headline:

Hundreds Of United Airlines Customers ‘Abandoned’ In Remote Canadian Barracks Without Heat, Little Food

I won’t reiterate the list of stories that portray United as a company that hates its customers and instead I want us to have a think about a bigger question.  Only four airlines—United, American, Southwest and Delta—now control 85% of domestic air travel due to mergers and acquisitions. I think we’ve all seen higher fares and worse customer service pretty much across the board. According to the Department of Transportation, airline-related complaints increased by 26% in 2014.  This same sort of routine – a business sector becoming more consolidated and customer service declining while prices rise – has played out elsewhere.  Banking, cable TV and broadband providers and insurance are just a few areas where we’ve all seen this play out.

My thinking is this.  Companies become too focused on improving systems without focusing on how those improvements affect customers.  United, for example, may focus on improving financial performance by increasing baggage and other fees while angering their customers.  Maybe their attitude is “If everyone does it, what choice will the customers have anyway?” and that has, for the most part, been true.  What’s also true, however, that the many of the quality metrics – are declining along with their costs.

Smart companies improve the bottom line but not at the customers’ expense.  They maintain the small company mentality even as they become quite large.  Customer satisfaction is always a front and center metric, and product improvements are made to benefit the customer, not always the bottom line.

All of which makes me wonder if “economies of scale” generated through dynamic growth can actually not mean “too big to care”.  Do you have any thinking on that?

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June 10, 2015 · 12:11 pm

I Can Hear You, I’m Just Ignoring You

This social media stuff isn’t exactly new anymore, right? I mean businesses have been immersed in it for at least 5 years and many for longer than that. So why do we keep screwing it up?

This crossed my screen earlier:

Thirty-three percent of consumers who contact brands on social media with a customer service question never get a response, according to a new study released today by management consulting firm The Northridge Group. Based on a survey of more than 1,000 respondents, the study finds that 26 percent of consumers choose social media for customer service when they can’t reach a representative through another channel. When companies do respond, more than 30 percent of their responses do not meet the customers’ expectations. In fact, social media has the lowest percentage of issue resolution and follow up of all the channels.

Seriously?  Well, maybe the data isn’t as disappointing as the headline:

The survey also found that just 3 percent of consumers cite social media as the fastest channel for issue resolution, and only 2 percent cite it as their preferred channel. Additional findings from the survey include:

  • Sixty-three percent of consumers have to engage with a brand two or more times on social media before a customer service inquiry or issue is resolved.
  • Forty-two percent of consumers expect resolution within one hour when using social media for customer service inquiry or issue.
  • Thirty-nine percent of consumers say that companies resolve their customer service issues or inquiries on social media within a week or longer.

Oh.  I know from lots of experience that businesses are spending precious marketing resources listening to what’s going on out there in an attempt to understand their customers’ needs.  Bravo!  But as with any activity, if we’re just going to ignore what our customers are telling us – especially when they’re telling it to us proactively – we might just as well spend the money elsewhere.

You can get the report here but don’t bother if you’re not going to use it to improve how you’re providing service via social media.  No one likes to be ignored, especially customers with a problem.  Maybe you should be digging into how many contacts have been initiated by customers?  Maybe you should keep score on how many have been addressed and resolved to the customer’s satisfaction?  Actually, this is one instance where if you ignore something – your customers – it will go away.  Is that the result you’re after?

 

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June 5, 2015 · 9:26 am

Chili’s (Again!)

Today’s Foodie Friday Fun really isn’t, but it’s definitely instructive. I’m sure you’ve been told to watch your drink when you go to a bar and never to leave it unattended for fear that someone might put something in it. One would hope that the person doing so isn’t a disgruntled employee.

A couple went to Chili’s and their server didn’t like that they were complaining about how their meal was prepared. They ordered a couple of drinks to go and the server spit in them. This was discovered when the lid popped off as the couple left. A quick return to Chili’s produced a refund and coupons for future meals (you’re kidding, right?  Who would go back?) but the couple wasn’t done. They took the cup to the police who took a DNA sample from the spit and from the server who denied doing anything. Busted! You can read a full account of this tale here.

There are so many things wrong here it’s hard to know where to begin. First, how is the staff not told that if the food isn’t prepared to the customer’s liking it’s a kitchen issue, not a service issue. Servers are customer service reps – they are there to help the customer. Period. Their job is to fix problems, not to cause them.  If there is an issue they can’t handle, escalate it to a manager. In this case, the server apparently took a kitchen issue personally.

Second – the server wasn’t fired on the spot. As a result the couple has sued Chili’s, the waiter, and Chili’s parent company.  In fact, he’s still working there.  What sort of statement does that make to the rest of the staff (yes, the server admitted to spitting in the drink after the DNA test)?  In this case the server felt put upon by the complaints the customer had.  What if another server has an issue with a customer’s race?  The story has been widely reported – would this be your first stop if you were nearby?  If a questionable social media post gets people fired, how does inducing this sort of negative reporting not?

Don’t kid yourself.  This sort of thing can happen in your business too.  A quick search for “service rep threatens customer” provides over a million results.  If you have customers (let’s hope!), anyone who interacts with them needs to understand the standards of acceptable behavior and when they need to escalate a problem upwards.  There is no circumstance in which doing what this server did is acceptable and he should have been fired immediately.

I realize I went off on Chili’s just a few Fridays ago and I’m not picking on them.  It’s interesting that their sales aren’t great, though, and it’s not a stretch to wonder if maybe there is a system wide issue when you read things such as this.  It’s a good reason for each of us to reexamine how we do things, don’t you think?

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