This month our Australian Managing Director Susan Wolfe returns to our newsletter to describe her recent difficulties in getting good customer service

There couldn’t be a more exciting time to be in our field. Never has there been such a discrepancy between what people expect as a customer and what they actually experience.

In the past few months, I’ve had more than my share of reasons to notice this. In the process of launching a new business, I’ve had to establish new telephone and broadband services, acquire a new internet domain and get email up and running, open a bank account, get a credit card, set up a post office box, take out business insurance, and start paying bills.

This is core business for the respective organisations delivering these services. In 2008, these transactions should run like clockwork. But they don’t.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, went right.

It all started with the telecommunications. I did my homework and knew exactly which company should have been the easiest to deal with; given the location of the new office and the services already used by others in the building.

I had expected that setting up a new business service with this company would be simple, after all, they have an entire branch devoted to supporting business customers. Therefore, I called the dedicated business number hoping to have the telephone and internet service up and running by the following week.

Consequently, I wasn’t really prepared for the initial 1 hour, 54 minute conversation, involving a customer service rep (CSR) who insisted on selling me a package that sounded suspiciously like home phone and internet service, which was not what I wanted.  She also asked if I wanted my business to have the same phone number as my holiday house (which is 90 kilometres away from the office), and as she didn’t know how to use the system, she repeatedly had to put me on hold in order to go and get help. She quoted me a price, a tentative new phone number and a reference number, and explained that all would be confirmed in the email that I would receive shortly.

Needless to say, the conversation didn’t inspire confidence that my phone service and broadband would be up and running anytime soon. Sure enough, the promised email never arrived and my suspicions were confirmed.

So, another conversation, over an hour long, was required two days later. Firstly, we had to undo everything the first CSR had done, and then start all over again. Fortunately, I happened to encounter someone who truly wanted to help. Unfortunately, the systems and processes she relied on to help me repeatedly let her down. It started with one system for requesting someone to come out to install the line, and then continued when a new line couldn’t be installed without re-wiring the whole building (and having me responsible for a minor public works project to tear up the street to lay new cables!) Numerous phone calls, input into various systems and a lot of finger pointing then ensued between divisions within the company and external organisations which provide cabling.

When it was finally agreed that the only solution was for someone to generously give up one of their lesser used lines, there were delays of several days while the line was transferred, numbers changed and capabilities added so that I could also send/receive faxes.  A new telephone-company handset was also issued, for which I was given a reference number to use when I picked up the phone at a local office. And in true form, it took not one, but two trips to that office before I walked out with a phone, because the reference number I had been given wasn’t compatible with the system that the office uses for issuing the phone.

As a customer, I shouldn’t have to know about the details of how this all worked, but by this stage I felt I deserved a Ph.D. in phone service provisioning!

After the saga of the phone line, it was with much trepidation that I approached the next job, getting broadband set up. However, apart from initially sending the modem to the wrong address, setting it up was surprisingly easy. To give this company their due, it was actually a very straightforward, ‘out-of-the-box’ experience, and one they should be proud of.  I was pleasantly surprised as I would have expected this to be a bit more complicated than getting a new phone - particularly since it relied on me doing all the work, once I had the equipment.

Unfortunately, however, the story doesn’t end there.  The three plus weeks involved in the phone/broadband setup was nothing compared to what I’ve been through, trying to get email working properly. The details are unimportant, but suffice to say that it’s now just shy of three months since that initial conversation to set up the service - and it’s still not working. I shouldn’t have to be on a first name basis with several of the CSRs, but I am. The last straw came recently when I was told that they couldn’t help me use Outlook, and my only solution was a new computer. My computer isn’t old, nor is my operating system, and I’m using their technology! I know this isn’t the kind of customer experience that I want or deserve.

Not an isolated event.

One might think that I just made the wrong decision with the company that I chose to use for telephone and broadband services, but the problem is pervasive. When I discovered that the closest post office had no available PO boxes, I inquired about opening a ‘locked bag’ service instead. The downside of this is that I could only pick up my mail during business hours and must wait in line to do so. The advantage, however, is that it is in walking distance of the office - convenient and a good excuse for exercise. Certainly a viable solution, except that the process of setting up a simple locked bag takes a month, as ’someone out of state has to enter it into the computer’! Yes, I’m driving to another post office to pick up our mail now.

To save me unnecessary trips. I’ve chosen to pay extra for them to email me when mail arrives. That’s money well spent for a good customer experience, except for the occasional false alarm when they send me an email even though the bag is empty. The manager explained that it’s easier to do a visual inspection than rely on the scanners to identify which people should receive notification, so they occasionally get it wrong.

It took countless visits and several weeks to open the business bank account - and this is at a bank where I am an established customer. I wasn’t given the information that I needed to begin transacting online. Furthermore, one of the two business credit cards issued now appears mixed amongst my personal banking portfolio, not the business accounts and the other one doesn’t appear anywhere. And let’s not talk about how internet banking didn’t work when I made my first rent payment from the new account. So much for impressing my new landlord that we’ll be reliable tenants!

Taking out business insurance wasn’t much easier. One of the two policies involved being sent a premium based on incorrect information entered by the CSR regarding the amount of coverage required (despite two phone calls about this very topic). The other policy was issued correctly, but when it came time to pay, the invoice included incorrect information about how to transmit payment.

What’s going on?

There are several causes of these failures to deliver. CSRs are trying to deal with complicated systems which don’t support them as direct users, let alone the customer as an indirect user. The systems (and, therefore, the CSRs) don’t speak the customers’ language. In my attempts to get the phone and email working, I’ve had countless conversations where I have had to give CSRs various numbers and codes that have no bearing on either my phone number or customer number - the only two numbers that I should really have to know. Jargon is pervasive.

Systems are designed in a vacuum, without considering the overall business process in which they have to fit. Furthermore, transactions are arbitrarily divided across these systems, such that it’s impossible for one person to resolve a problem (’Sorry, I’d love to help you, but I don’t have access to that system’). The processes are simply not in sync with users’ expectations or needs, and they often do little to support the business’ needs either.

Training for the CSRs on the systems is woefully inadequate, and usually at the expense of the customer. My first failed attempt at getting the phone set up while talking with a "specialist business service person" was evidence of that.

The list goes on and on - and I haven’t even made it to the whole notion of abysmal correspondence with the customer and customer self-service via the internet. However, if an organisation can’t get their internal systems right, they don’t have a chance of getting customer self-service working well.

Customers expect and demand more.

These products and services are available anywhere and everywhere, so the only real differentiator is the customer experience. Sadly, there’s a lot of rhetoric around good customer experience, but unfortunately not often a lot of delivery on the promise. As a consumer, I have choices and can easily research alternatives to every single organisation that I’ve dealt with in setting up this business. The companies make it fairly easy to switch as well, and I am highly motivated to do so. I shouldn’t have to invest this much time or effort in these simple transactions. I’m certainly not alone in thinking that I’d rather patronise companies that deliver on their promise, and do so accurately, quickly and seamlessly.

That’s where customer experience design comes in - recognising that the optimal customer experience can only be designed through a holistic approach that understands and balances the needs of the business with those of the customers. But in order to do this, one has to first understand what those needs and expectations really are, and then explicitly design systems to support them.

The final irony of this long, sad tale is that all of these experiences described have happened while setting up a company called Optimal Experience! We clearly have our work cut out for us. That’s why there’s no more exciting time than now to be in our field.