A Story

I was listening to a friend of mine the other day tell a story that made me cringe for the company she was talking about. She had taken the time to purchase services from a mobile service provider and was trying to contact them about a question she had with her bill.

As a background to this story, this service provider, like all others, has built out there service channels to allow people to contact them in any number of different ways. They have a call center, an email support group, a chat team and of course the good old fashioned IVR.

Now, back to the story.....

So my friend had a question about her bill and started out using the email service to see if she could get an answer in that channel. She emailed the company, told them her issue and was expecting to hear back in a "timely" manner as the issue was not incredibly pressing. She got a response, but not a resolution.

So she tried another channel, the chat function on their site. She did not get the answer she needed from that service either.

So she moved to the voice channel because that is the only place where she thought she could trust that she would be heard and get an answer to her question. She finally did get her answer and moved on with her day.

What can we learn from this story that applies to the broader service world?

1. People are trying to use alternate channels to connect with companies but more often than not, these alternate channels are not as responsive as customers would like.

2. When my friend called the call center, they did not know that she had tried to service herself in other channels. So not only did the agent not have all the background, the management was not going to see that my friend didn't get her question answered the first time in the first channel she used.

3. Broadly speaking, people will quickly gravitate to the channel that affords them the quickest resolution to their issue at that moment.

4. This company and others are training their customers to avoid the channels that they have spent so much time and money on creating to try to cut costs.

It is unfortunate in this case that the experience was difficult and cumbersome. The sad part of the story is that this company will likely never know that it took three attempts by my friend to get this single issue resolved, which means they will likely never know how many others are experiencing the same frustration.....