The Corded Phone Incident
Posted by Dave Capuano on Fri, Oct 15, 2010
My wife runs her own business and the phone is critical part of how she engages her customers and prospects. The other day I came home from work and got my “IT” call from her office: “Honey…..can you check my phone, it is not working.” After a long day at the office, the last thing I want to do is crawl under her desk, unplug stuff and start the process of troubleshooting. But seeing as I married myself into becoming her IT department, I forged ahead. I started the standard operating procedure. Plug in another phone….nothing. Plug the phone into another jack (which happens to be our home number)…dial tone. So with that simple two-step process, I know there is an issue, so I pick up the phone and call the phone company. This is where the art of customer service comes into play.
As I get transferred over to technical support the gal on the other end goes through her standard process. She runs a line check, asks me questions about trying another phone, etc. She then suggests I get a phone with a cord and go to the box outside to check if there is an issue with the inside wiring. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t had a phone with a cord in my house for about 10 years (okay, 20, but I want to sound younger than I am).
My customer service representative tried to push the need to do this test in order to potentially save me money on a service call should the issue stem from problems with inside wiring. I let her know my position. My wife’s business had no phone and the issue needed to get addressed immediately. If a technician came to my house and determined the issue was with inside wiring, I’d have him there to fix it (for a fee of course). I won’t bore you with the details but after a lengthy discussion where I explain I have no corded phone, nor do my neighbors, nor am I going to see if there is one at Best Buy, I realized that this discussion was leading nowhere, and I did what any frustrated customer would do: I hung up and called back.
Navigating the customer service phone tree for a second time, I finally get my second human. This time the process went how I expected it to go the first time. I get a different customer service rep. She walks through the process, tests the line, determines there might be an issue and lets me know she can have a rep out the next day. She informs me should the issue be with inside wiring there would be a charge. Action! Things are moving and I’m happy. More importantly my customer (my wife) is happy…so I thought. My next interaction was a voicemail from this company stating the technician couldn’t make it out the scheduled day and would try the following day…so the saga continues.
That got me thinking about what we had in the archives on an experience like this, so I went to the source of all knowledge, Jeffrey, and he pointed me to a blog he wrote in June. It was about the proprietary measure Corporate Executive Board introduced, the Customer Effort ScoreTM. The measure shows the more effort a customer must put forth in a service interaction, the less likely they are to be loyal.
Yeah, that’s me in this case. If my wife didn’t need a business line, or if I could have convinced her to go to just a wireless number, I would have cancelled the line. As a consumer, I sometime feel put out asking for help I should expect. I’m not looking to be wowed, but I do expect to get what I pay for, and I should have my problem resolved or questions answered. Next we will see if they ask for my feedback on the customer service experience. I’m not holding my breath but I am having one of our sales guys engage them…as they clearly could use our help.