Customer Service In A Connected Age
Transparency has become a bit of a buzzword lately. However almost everyone misunderstands what transparency in todays always connected culture actually amounts to, and how they should leverage it from a business and engagement perspective. Wednesday I had a horrible experience with a company who I rely on, not because they failed, but because of a lack of transparency in dealing with their customer(s).
At about 1130am PST my internet went down. This isn’t a frequent occurrence, so I didn’t think much of it. I tested a few things, tried calling my ISP after I confirmed the problem wasn’t in my apartment and got a fast busy. No big deal, I made some lunch and tweeted to them that things were down and using my mobile phone (the future is nifty) I opened a ticket via their web form.
By about 1pm I was starting to get concerned as other people on twitter all over the greater San Diego area were reporting outages. Since I work from home most of the time I, like many others, need to be connected. After a few conference calls I finally got someone on the phone. The customer support representative gave me a non-committal statement about how the problem was being “worked on very diligently”. This stance continued on twitter with a number of their customers asking for ETA’s and details on what specifically was wrong. Essentially we were all being blown off.
You should assume some of your customers are well informed about the services your business provides — especially if they rely on them.
Now here is the thing — this sucks, and I’m sure some people somewhere were busting their hump to fix BGP or replace some broken gear. They had a real bad day. Worse than mine I’m sure. However that wasn’t being explained or communicated at all. There was no transparency. Worse than that for the first few hours of the outage no communication at all occurred on social media, in their tickets or otherwise. They merely confirmed there was a problem and moved on.
Thats a major failure, and like so many things it is a cultural failure. Someone in their leadership ranks, likely in the customer support organization, has set the tone that communicating details with customers is not a good idea and that further engagement with customers around problems is an even worse idea.
These days that ideology presents a problem because often your customers know more than you want to believe. You need to stop assuming everyone who buys from you is a moron. I worked in tech support back in the late 90’s and early 00’s, so I know this is a cultural issue — I’ve seen it and participated in it first hand.
However its not the year 2000, all people are well networked and connected. The game has changed and you must adapt to it. The cultural failure and lack of transparency continued when all the support tickets were closed with “fixed” but no details were provided, and they posted a blog stating that no details would be forthcoming — because it might confuse people.
The result of this stance is frustrated customers. Back in the day customers were isolated, now they are not, now those customers communicate with one another frequently at meetups, on twitter, in facebook groups and occasionally in person.
As a real life example several of us have exchanged messages speculating what the issue was, if it will re-occur and what our contingency plans should be if it does. None of which is doing our ISP’s brand or customer satisfaction rating any good, and all of which could have been avoided by a simple blog post and/or tweet giving some details.
There is no point in putting my ISP on blast by name, cause that won’t accomplish anything and this isn’t really about their issues, but rather about the world as a whole and how customer engagement and satisfaction has changed. If you are starting a company, working in a customer facing role or are part of the leadership at an organization I’d implore you to think about how your decisions around transparency and communication are impacting customers and the people in your organization. These problems are not just related to ‘always on’ services, as others have observed the lack of transparency and communication from customer service organizations even happens in places like Starbucks:
“Customer service isn’t just mechanical recourse. A free-drink coupon does not make up for the inconvenience or the loss of time or the plain flat-out irritation I’ve experienced.”
Most companies treat customer service as a buffer rather than an integral part of the business. Combining that horrific strategy with the lack of transparency leads to companies like Comcast being lambasted at every turn, and while they have a monopoly in many cases most businesses do not.
So while I’m sure there is a case study supporting the customer service as a shield ideology, I’m equally certain its costing most companies an immense amount of business because we are in a connected age where communication happens instantly across the globe with complete strangers. The last thing you want from a brand perspective is strangers bonding over how bad your support is, how horrible an outage was or anything similar.
As a contrast in a similar market space look at how Netflix communicates with its customers. Gory technical details are publicly available online: http://techblog.netflix.com/ and they use this as a recruitment tool, and it builds immense rapport with their customer base. No speculation or worry needed. You as a customer know whats going on. Transparency in all its splendor and horror.
For further reading on this topic take a look at the Delivering Happiness book by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, which does a good job providing a contrasting approach. Just remember — your customers are going to talk about you, it can either be an informed discussion brought about by the transparency of your culture or a speculative discussion brought about by the lack of transparency. In my experience a speculative discussion is usually a negative one.
