If a tree falls in the forest and no one was there to hear it, did it make a sound?
Steve White finds out it’s nice to deal with companies that are easy to do business with.
Recently the head gasket gave up on my car. Ouch! There’s also something wrong with the turbo, and I explained carefully to my friend at the garage the exact circumstances by which the problem could be reproduced. The car then vanished into a black-hole of silence.
A recent piece of research indicates that while we mess around with reducing mean time to this and improving first-time that, customer satisfaction with a company is simply a function of how easy the company is to do business with. The research showed that “how easy it is to transact with a company” is the overwhelming thing that drives customer satisfaction and it’s a stark yardstick and yet it resonates with me.
It was slightly drizzling, cold and windy in the Long Term car park at Heathrow, light was fading and all I needed to do was book a hotel room, so with mobile broadband up and 747s screeching to a halt next to me I logged into a hotel chain portal to search and book a room. Fingers numbing with cold I navigated to their site, found the room, came to pay for it and the ‘Verified by VISA’ window did not appear in the browser. This same fault had happened to me two weeks before, and I phoned them that time to start the process all over again. Since then they had taken their phone number off their website, so on to Yell to find their number, an ACD and five minutes of ‘your call is important to us’ and I was speaking to someone. It took not four minutes to book a room, but 23 cold, damp minutes of my life which I’m not going to get back. I was told by the call centre person that a few people call with this problem each day. Easy to transact with? No!
Now I consider myself a professional trouble-shooter, and I’d like this payment method to work for me – ‘Verifed by VISA’ works on all the other sites I visit, so I offered this hotel chain help to solve this problem. I wrote a nice note to their customer services offering to work with them as I had a reproducible test case. What did I get back? Nothing. They appear not interested to bother to allow me to help them take in more money. Customer satisfaction? Not much there I think.
The next communication I had with my garage was more than a week later, them asking me how to reproduce the turbo problem. <sigh>.
And so onto the philosophical question. If a question is asked by a customer services organisation and the answer is not written down, was the question ever asked?
If you’re the customer services organisation, the answer is ‘no’ since there is no record of the question or the answer.
If you’re the customer – the answer is ‘yes’ and it’s the quickest way for a support organisation to add another negative experience in the mind of the caller to their personal ‘how easy it was to transact with you’ figure.
