Customer service innovation

To have a relationship with your customer is the key to a brand’s success. Nowadays, every brand is pushed to interact with their customers. To have a interaction is not enough. You have to maintain and nurture that relationship. One little slip and you can lose your customer.

Telecommunication industries depend on those interaction, yet somehow their customer service has stayed the same as it was last century. Let’s take T-com for example. I bought MaxTV two years ago and it was malfunctioning very often so I had to call the customer service to fix my problem. First I waited for them to answer approximately an hour and a half. When an agent answered, I explained my problem. He connected me with another agent since he couldn’t help to resolve the issues.That whole reconnecting situation would have been acceptable but the other agent didn’t know my problem and I had to share my story once again from the beginning. He said that he couldn’t help me either and that he would connect me with someone who can. Imagine my surprise. The whole thing repeated itself. I hung up the phone after the forth try, went in their store the other day and canceled my subscription and tore up my contract with them. I can only imagine how many people have the same problem as me. I would have stayed a loyal customer if they had just connected me with an agent who already knew my problem. The constant reconnecting was not the problem, their ignorance was.

I have been listening to CRM (customer relationship management) class at my university. It is an application that helps monitor and nurture the relationship with customers in one place. It has three modules: sales, marketing and customer service.

If T-com had implemented CRM’s customer service module, my story would go like this:

My MaxTV had issues and didn’t work properly so I contacted T-com’s customer service. After the phone ringing briefly, an agent answered and I explained him my problem. He connected me with an agent who immediately gave me a solution to my problem without asking me one single thing. I was very satisfied with them and I will be their customer for a very long time. I will spread a word to all the people I know and recommend T-com to everyone.

Two very different outcomes, one simple solution.
Which one do you choose, T-com?