Customer disservice - Redux

Manu's blog yesterday carried several examples of customer disservice. One would have thought that we'd get better service as the economy modernizes. And we typically do. But there are three typical problems.

1. The organization is in either a "hit and run" or "God" mode. This organization does not care about its customers. That's part of the organization's philosophy and flows from either the ownership or top management. A number of India's private educational institutions are unfortunately in the "hit and run" category! And many government services all around the world operate in "God" mode where they feel they are answerable to no one.

2. The organization is well-meaning but incompetent. This too happens from time to time. Currently the cellphone operators fall in this bucket with respect to network quality. Tens of millions of uses are being added every month and though they would like to give good service to customers like myself who have run up six figure bills in the recent past, they just don't have the bandwidth (literally and metaphorically).

Another stunning example of such incompetence happened to me recently with HSBC where I have a Premier account. HSBC acts very serious about security - they even give you a special device that generates a new code every few seconds that you have to enter into their online banking site along with your user ID and password (you cannot use an old code). So imagine my surprise two weeks ago when I logged into my account with all the credentials feeling highly secure only to read: "Dear Mr. Amit Sardana, as per your request, your address has been changed to xyz." What??!! I did a double-take like you see in the movies.

It's been a week and they haven't been able to explain how they changed not just my address but my NAME, although they keep sending offers for "free champagne and cake at the Le Meridien all through September to celebrate the birthday of your spouse". Hmm.

3. The organization is process driven but forgot to add a process for your particular problem. Manu gives an example and we all have our stories. In such cases, NO ONE KNOWS how to fix the thing for you. The option is just not on their computer screens and they just don't know how to do it. They don't have any escalation process for this. Worse, they don't have any continuous improvement or kaizen process to log your special case so that they can address it later! They will simply lose a customer and a lot of goodwill.

In fact, in India we are still at the beginning of service automation and there are still manual workarounds possible in most cases. The people manning these service centers are still fairly educated and somewhat alive intellectually. I have seen the future (in the US) and it is scary in some ways. Everything is process driven, there are no workarounds, and working in a call center is often a very low-end job. If you are served by the process, fine, otherwise you are ejected from the process into deep space with arms flailing where no one can hear you any longer. The only thing that works in such situations is to use the clout of your credit card company - American Express can have your money refunded for you when all else is lost because your service provider has a process for THAT.