“Sue them!” I
recently advised one of my clients who has a constant complaint about the
service levels from his bank. After listening to his latest ‘Agony Aunt’ lamentations
that I thought I‘d just about had enough of, I felt that indeed it was time to
take action. The bank handles his organization’s account which in my view qualifies
him as a priority customer based on the transaction levels and amounts.
In this particular instance the bank’s money wiring system
had some ‘technical’ problem that had taken two days to sort out. This had
grossly interfered with his ability to wire salaries to his staff in the
region. And him being CEO of a company that’s takes pride in honouring payment dates,
was loathe to explain to his people that a technical hitch would delay their
pay. The only practicable solution necessitated that he and his finance
officer, go into the bank, withdraw the entire amount and deposit each staff’s
salary individually into their accounts to ensure these were immediately reflected.
Listening to his annoyed proclamations, mulling over the inconvenience
of abandoning our strategy session and the thought of the impending exercise
that involved him spending a significant amount of time in the banking hall undertaking
manual tasks to achieve the desired objective – I was quite appalled. I
requested him to compute the man-hours he had already spent following up with
the bank and the hours that would be spent in the bank both by himself and his
finance officer and to nicely ring that up and send it to the bank with a
letter from his lawyer. All this would
have been completed by the automatic click of technology, and is the reason for
which he signed up for the automatic salary transfer system.
What for me what the wringer, the straw that broke the camel’s
back, was that all this back and forth, discussions being held and his interaction
with the bank over this matter was through the bank’s call center. One would
have imagined that this kind of malfunction from a bank of high repute would have
his phone inundated with calls from the bank manager or some other such
important person in the bank’s pecking order apologizing profusely for the
problem and seeking to see how best to make good. This call center experience
involved during many instances, an auto response informing him that all the
call center agents were busy at the time and that they would get to him ‘as
soon as possible’. He’d made several
attempts to get through with the calls truncating mid the waiting period. His frustration
was palpable.
I wondered out loud to myself and to him – who exactly
should be responsible for bearing the costs of these calls? Doesn’t it behoove
a service provider who offers a help desk or call center service for clients,
to have some software that identifies incoming calls, how long the person has
been on hold and the specific customer profile of the caller? This would then
enable an auto response for priority level customers that the provider would
get back to them and then have an agent actually do so?
In my then very justice seeking and indignation on his behalf
demanded that he compute as well the cumulative time he’d spent making calls
including the attempted calls to the bank, and the opportunity cost based on
other important things he’d have been doing at the time, ring up that bill as
well and serve it hot right along with the earlier billing in the letter the
lawyer was going to submit.
Why would we as service providers not provide systems and
processes that are customer centric and that focus on providing a smooth,
hustle free experience for our customers? Customers are very simple people. All
they want is quality, consistency and practical solutions for their needs. That’s
all. They do not need bells and frills and belly dancers sent to titillate
their senses – ok ok once in a while they’d love that too – but not as a
typical occurrence daily…..
Customers stay loyal
to organizations who serve up pain free processes. So much so that pain-free is the new ‘excellent’. We are so used to problems, used to things that don’t work, used to false promises and ‘technical hitches’ such that when what should actually
be the norm happens, we record it in our ‘excellent’ rating scale.
So given that the bar isn’t set so far beyond reach in terms
of eliciting customer loyalty, doesn’t it follow that we should at the very
least ease our customers’ pain? Because soon enough their pain will be painful enough to have them ‘monetize’
their pain levels and the legal ‘pain’ that will follow will not be well worth the pain of having not
eliminated the original pain in the first place.
Here’s wishing you and your customers a pain- free week
ahead J
