Like It Was Hard

After you’ve been writing a blog like this one for a few years, pointing out various types of business failure, mocking people and organizations that really should have known better, and generally getting on people for mistakes that seem obvious after the fact, it gets increasingly difficult to avoid saying “I told you so” (or perhaps “I informed you thusly,” if you watch The Big Bang Theory) when somebody makes a completely predictable mistake. I’m on record as saying that you should never second-guess the decisions somebody else made in a crisis; they were there and you weren’t, and we have no way of knowing what your actions would have been. But when it’s a business policy, not a single decision, and it blows up a way that any small child could have predicted after dozens of business writers in addition to me have been going on about it for years…

Take, for example, the recent case of a customer service fiasco at Comcast. It really should have been a non-issue: a customer had decided to cancel their service due to dissatisfaction with the company, and had declined all efforts to retain them. Any service provider is going to get calls like that, because no matter how hard you try to improve your service or support functions there will always be somebody who doesn’t like something or who just manages to fall through the cracks. If you do business with 10,000 customers today, and all but one of them are happy with your service, you can correctly claim to have a 99.99% customer satisfaction rating. However, to that one remaining customer whose appointment was entered for the wrong time, whose bill was miscalculated, who was accidentally left on hold over someone’s lunch break, who was not informed of a service interruption because his or her telephone number was not recorded correctly, or any of a thousand other minor failures, your success rate is 0%, and their satisfaction will change accordingly…

So why didn’t the company’s representative just process the disconnection and let it go? Without access to Comcast’s Human Resources files I couldn’t tell you for certain; it’s possible that the company has a bonus for the number of customers you talk out of disconnecting, or a penalty for the number of customers you weren’t able to successfully retain; it’s also possible that the rep in question or even his work group as a whole were being admonished for losing too many customers lately. Perhaps Comcast isn’t recruiting the right people, or isn’t providing the right training, or perhaps every one of their thousands of customer service representatives is great except for this one. But for this one particular customer, the company is every bit as bad as its horrible reputation would suggest, and now the audio recording of the call has gone viral, making the company a laughing stock yet again…

I’ve written in this space about the need for top-flight customer service personnel; I’ve gone on at length about how to recruit them, how to train them, how to lead them, and how to make them better. But my most often-repeated comment has been about how the customer service representative may well be the lowest-paid, least-educated, least-trained and most-ignored member of your entire corporation, but if he or she performs poorly enough on any given call nothing else is going to matter. You are going to lose that customer and everyone he or she can persuade to follow them – and in the Internet age, if your customer service rep is bad enough for long enough it’s only a matter of time before somebody records the call and starts playing it for everyone in the world…

This disaster wouldn’t have been easy or cheap to prevent – but it’s not like it was difficult to predict that something like this was going to happen…