Telecom Data - The Right Fix For Telecom Complaints
Compared to the travel industry where 45% of the complaints logged were regarding
the quality of accommodation, 50% of consumers complaining about the Telecom industry say that customer service is the root cause of their dissatisfaction. Is getting rid of poor attitude and behaviour as straight forward as fixing broken plumbing or cleaning a stained carpet?
The reference data
As passion 4 customers is in infant stage when it comes to complaint management, the number of complaint still only range in hundreds. The complaints growth rate however is running at 300% per month.
The number of Telecom complaints is lower than for the travel industry but Telecom is the second industry generating dissatisfaction amongst consumers. Customers in the age group 31-40 logged the vast majority of complaints whereas for the travel industry the age group was between 51-70. The complaints spread across the UK, France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands.
Dissatisfaction drivers
By order of importance, consumers are articulating that customer service, handset exchange and invoice charges are their source of grief. Being familiar with the Telecom industry since 2004, I find it interesting to note that consumer views haven't changed over the past 5 years in fact these are the same issues in the exact same order as back then. This probably isn't a surprise and accepted as a fact of customer services life by now.
But reflect on this; in the early 90's the number one driver for dissatisfaction at HP's European contact centre was due to call centre accessibility. Customers were repetitively arguing the fact that they did not want to wait to be served; the time it took to reach a technician was unacceptable. The logical response to this problem is to increase and maintain a constant high level of staffing throughout the day. This solution did not prove effective on customer survey ratings despite answering 95% of calls within 90 seconds. It took HP sustained focus and broad thinking to determine the real issue at hand: the number of hand-off's a customer experienced before reaching the right person and the overly complicated and unfamiliar Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system were defined as "accessibility issues" by customers yet labelled differently. Today these are known facts and most organisations cover these basics but in the early days of call centres this was a remarkable discovery.
Making sense of customer feedback
Coming back to the Telecom customer service topic and taking the same approach as HP did reveals that poor customer service is interpreted in many various ways and not purely related to the person you spoke with.
The first important element to note is that it is not a single Telecom provider's problem, it is an industry problem. Just like accessibility wasn't an HP problem but I strongly believe HP was incremental in paving the way for change in ridding call centres of this stigma.
The next essential part is to understand how consumers define customer service. At first glance you notice rude, arrogant, unfriendly and unhelpful as being what customers are criticising. Since I do not for one second believe that customer service representatives go out of their way to use slang, be hostile call in and call out as well as object to helping, a closer look into customer feedback gives a few clues. "He became unfriendly and I realised he didn't understand what I was talking about", "the service representative did not listen to me nor solve my problem but offered standard answers".
This type of feedback is not new. In these cases, service representatives are impacted by a lack of knowledge. As yourself the question; how would you react when constantly being asked questions to which you did not know the answer? Would you offer standard and non-relevant answers as a means to get off the call? Would you become uncomfortable, embarrassed and therefore unfriendly?
Finding the right fix
I often see companies investing a lot of time and money into monitoring calls and coaching. When calling customer service you typically hear that calls may be recorded for quality purposes. Does it help? I do not believe so for the simple reason that call volumes outweigh the amount of staff available to review all interactions. In fact, it is ironic that companies who focus on these types of exercises will confirm that their internal rating on 2 to 10 calls per month per agent is very high yet customers think otherwise.
If call monitoring and coaching is intended to spot any training gaps and as a consequence to address them I fail to understand why companies are not investing this time and money on re-evaluating its training curricular. Why aren't the training departments held accountable for customer satisfaction performance?
Training is a good example to highlight a vicious circle. As part of a recent call centre assessment, I asked a company to share with me their 2-week program. the schedule looked complete at first until I asked about the 'what-if'. What if a customer doesn't agree with your policies? What if a customer doesn't like your product? What if the question is not standard? I was told that the telephone skills part of the training taught agents how to handle delicate situations.
But that is precisely the misconception, just like a presentation skills training will not provide you with the content of the message but the way to deliver it, the telephone skills training teaches you how to manage the dialogue but not what to say! What is missing is the 'what' to say not 'how' to say it in most cases.
No customer service training I have experienced provides the tools necessary to negotiate your way tactfully through uncommon questions. Here is a customer story, which shows how a small detail can make all the difference.
"I rang my Telecom provider to change my account details. The agent noticed that my contract was up for renewal and asked me whether I wanted to extend my contract for another 24 months and upgrade my Iphone to the 3G model. I say yes provided I could use my current Iphone with another provider as it was still perfectly functioning. The agent answered I would have to wait a few months before being able to unlock my Iphone. When I asked why, the agent did not offer an explanation. When I asked about the exact amount of months, I did not get an answer. When I asked her to seek an answer with a superior, she could not do that. In fact this was so vague I felt it was a tactic to get me to sign up for another 24 months. I didn't trust her and declined."
If this agent knew the answer, she probably would have persuaded the customer to extend his contract and purchase a new handset. the customer on his side rated customer service as unhelpful and unfriendly.
Training is merely one illustration of a process which consumers often complain about by labelling it 'poor customer service'. In order to truly fix customer dissatisfaction, an organisation has to be prepared to lift up every corner stone to find the true cause and effect.
by: Nathalie Frechet
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