My partner Angela lost her driver’s license and had to go to the DMV to get it replaced. You know the drill: take the morning off, stand in line, fill out the paperwork, get a number, have a seat, wait for your number to be called, go to window 14. And after all of that be told, “Sorry, folks. Our system is down. Come back tomorrow. Next.”
“Our system is down?” If you had a dollar for every time some faceless customer service rep used that excuse for why you had waited on hold for 22 minutes you wouldn’t have to wait on hold for anything.
This past Friday I was put out of business by Earthlink for 12 hours. No email, no web sites, no presence in cyberspace for 12 hours. Why? Because some woman in Bangalore whose name I can’t pronounce but who claimed to be “Tammie” neglected to check the “Computer Override” box on her touch screen that sent my account to the “suspended” file at the stroke of midnight in a time zone far, far away. Vaporized. 12 websites, 26 email accounts, 1800+ email addresses in my address book. And, of course, the email confirmations that my bill had been paid.
So after I calmed myself down from going postal on Peachtree, I took cell phone in hand and dialed 1.800.Earthlink. A 13-digit phone number for a 12-digit system. Branding gone insane. And I got that insidious voice-activated voice. You know the one. The one that keeps talking while you keep screaming “Operator” and “Agent” into the phone over and over, until she finally deigns to say, “I believe you said you wanted to speak to an agent.”
And she switches you into another loop, with her electronic sister. “Push 1 to blow off the top of your head. Push 2 to stab yourself in the chest.” At which point you go back to screaming “Operator” and “Agent” into the phone over and over. But Electrobitch still doesn’t want to hear it. Finally you get a real human being. “Chad.” You know dude’s name really isn’t “Chad” but you go with it.You spill out your entire miserable hard luck story, only to have “Chad” inform you in his best broken English that he is customer service for Earthlink Cable and he is going to connect you with someone who can really help.
Before you can protest, “Chad’ has sent you back into the jaws of Voicerella who says “Push 1 to kiss my ass. Push 2 to eat my shorts.” Now I’m headed for cardiac arrest. I push the “eat my shorts” option and I’m told the wait time is 25 minutes for a real person with another fake name.
Like a dumb ass, I’m doing this from my cell phone, so the toll free call is still costing me a fortune. But now it’s bigger than that. I’m dealing with Earthlink like a soldier. Kill or be killed. I soldier on. Finally, “Becky” gets on the phone and I have to run down the entire saga once again. I start out, “This is a recording…” She doesn’t get it. Cross-border humor doesn’t work. Becky tells me she can restore my service. For a $15 restoration fee.
A what?! That does it. I am now officially over the edge. Luckily, she comes to her senses before I have to go Primevil on her Bangalorian ass. Becky offers to waive the fee and tells me my service will be restored in five minutes. I tell her to hold on. I make her wait five minutes while I try to pull up my web sites and access my web mail. I get nothing. Becky says the sites are coming up fine on her end. I tell her my clients in Bangalore will be glad to know that but in my time zone I get bupkiss. She puts me on hold. Ten minutes pass. Now I’m back in business, but I’m still on hold. After 15 minutes I hang up.
Nothing works any more. Least of all the term “customer service.” Our clients spend millions of dollars having us put on a good face, only to ship their most vital customer touch points off shore to save a buck. Legendary Pimp, “Iceberg Slim” said it best, “To be a Mack you got just two jobs. Get a ‘ho. Keep a ‘ho.” Every pimp has to dress his lady. Every business has to see to the needs of the people who pay them.
Earthlink used to host 15 web sites for me. Now they are down to three. ValueWeb took my business away from them. ValueWeb is three times as expensive. But they were all about seeing to the needs of their customers. Then ValueWeb was taken over by Hostway. Now their service is dreadful. And they are no longer worth three times the price of Earthlink. And I just became a short timer.
What’s more, a full 71 percent of all of the sales and marketing decision-makers that made up a recent CustomerSat survey reported that they lacked a comprehensive process for identifying which customers were lost to their competitors or which were simply inactive. And of that 71 percent, a full 68 percent admitted that they had no process or methodology in place that would afford them the means to predict how their customers would act before switching to their competitors. In other words, they were totally out of touch with their most at-risk customers without a clue as to how to stop the bleeding.
What is wrong with this picture? When did it become more cost effective to acquire a customer instead of maintain a customer? When did the geniuses of CRM figure out that a field on a computer screen that says, “This guy is really pissed at us,” was an unnecessary option? Why hasn’t somebody at Earthlink figured out that I keep giving them less and less money each month? I’ll tell you why. Because the people in charge of all these computers that keep going down keep telling themselves that it’s all about TCO. Total Cost of Ownership. Not TCC. Total Cost in Customers.
Somebody is brain dead at the top of the food chain. And with economy about to tank, every customer they’ve got is going to be thinking twice about TPO. Times Pissed-Off. And “Becky,” her boss, his boss, their boss and all the bosses up the food chain are going to be standing in that unemployment line, only to be told, “Sorry, our system is down. Come back tomorrow. Next.”
Think About It.
NOTE: I will be in New York this week and next. MA willbe posted next Friday
I can’t find it now, but on Retailwire.com within the last year, somebody quoted a study that showed that 60% (or was it 80%?) of retailer corporate execs thought their customer service was doing the job. But only 8% of customers agreed.
Another Retailwire post mentioned a retailer whose corporate management referred to store-level employees as monkeys.
And of course we all know the story of Circuit City, who decided its hardest-working, most knowledgeable sales folks were a drag on profits (assuming those were the ones who had wound up at the top of the pay heap and thus were too expensive) so they all had to go.
Finally, there’s the experience my son and I had at our favorite AT&T store. He wanted a particular phone we had seen online, so we went over to pick one up – and found it was a hundred bucks more at the store than it was online!
Apparently American business only knows how to cut costs to grow margins – either it thinks customers have no choice, and revenues are forever, or it has no idea how to grow those revenues, either by growing market share or making the entire pie bigger.
I don’t mean to tar all American retailers – clearly Nordstrom and Trader Joe’s, to name two, aren’t playing this game. But it’s amazing how few and far between the companies are that understand the basics of business.