Missing the Point – Again

I’ve reported on a lot of failures of customer service standards in this space, partly because I’ve spent so much time in customer service jobs myself, but mostly because I still fancy myself an Institutional Failure scholar, and there is no better way to fail in a service economy (even if your company is not, itself, a service business) than by providing substandard customer service. Unfortunately, this fact doesn’t seem to be as obvious in Corporate America as it is to us; many companies outsource their customer service functions to countries where the customer service representatives they are now employing may never have even seen the products or used the services they are taking calls about, and even those that don’t outsource the function have a tendency to employ the cheapest, most disposable personnel they can for this function…

The problem with such a policy, as previously noted in this space, is that the front-line customer service representative (hereinafter CSR) is the first, and sometimes only, point of contact customers have with your company. If your CSRs are rude, surly, unhelpful, or just plain stupid, you run the risk of angering or alienating the customer to the point where they will no longer do business with your company – yet, the CSR is usually the lowest-paid, least-trained, least-experienced, and least appreciated-person in the company. This is bad enough when all we’re talking about is help desk and product feature explanation duties, but when the CSR in question is, in effect, making company policy on the spot by granting or denying customer billing requests, you have the potential for that minimum-wage (or just barely higher than minimum-wage) employee to make your entire company a nation-wide laughing stock…

Case in point is this article from the St. Petersburg Times website, about a Verizon CSR who apparently refused to disconnect (and stop billing for) a dead customer’s account even after receiving a certified copy of his death certificate. Apparently, this un-named CSR was demanding the (deceased) customer’s personal identification number (PIN), and when told that he hadn’t given it to anyone, told the customer’s daughter that there was nothing the CSR could do for her, before laughing and hanging up the phone. Think about that for a moment: upon being told that the PIN could not be provided, this idiot CSR just laughed and hung up, refusing to help. Did she think the customer’s family was lying for some nefarious purpose? Or did she just expect them to continue paying his (no longer needed) telephone bill for all of eternity?

Even worse is the fact that, according to the news story, the family was trying to close out the customer’s bills and settle his estate, but would not be able to sell his house while the account was still open. It’s a screw-up so bad that even Verizon (which isn’t known for especially good customer service) couldn’t believe it; they’ve since apologized for the CSR and promised to refund the bill for the period during which the customer was already deceased, as well as closing the account. The consumer affairs reporter who filed the story is suggesting that it’s a good example of why you should make sure that your next of kin (or whoever might have to clean up after you’re gone) should have all of your PIN numbers, and even suggests some ways to accomplish this. But I regret to say that I think they’re both missing the point, here…

That point being that unless your company invests more time, effort, training, and (if at all possible) money in your customer service personnel, especially those engaged in billing functions, you will almost certainly have to deal with a similar case, sooner or later. If the screw-up is bad enough, as in yesterday’s Amex/Best Buy story, there is a non-zero chance that not only will you have extensive public relations issues to cope with, but you might also find a jury full of people who do not appreciate idiotic customer service policies has just given one of your mistreated customers tens of millions of dollars you do not have in punitive damages. In the long run, it would probably be cheaper to just invest a few more resources into your customer service department in the first place…

And you wouldn’t have to deal with thousands of scruffy bloggers mocking you all over the Internet…