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. With Rage Against the (Customer-Service) Machine
Posted Under: Service Rage
I guess most people with sites like this apologize for the silence when they haven’t posted lately. In my case I should probably just say: You’re welcome.
Anyway, I’ve been finishing a longish story that I hope will come out in July, so it’s been rather hectic. But I think I’m in the home stretch, so now I’m getting caught up and giving some thought to what’s next. Two broad topics have been on my mind. One is customer service. Two service-rage incidents got a surprising amount of attention recently. There was the guy who videotaped a Comcast tech who fell asleep on his couch. And there was the guy who recorded a frustrating experience with AOL customer service, put it on his Web site, and ended up on the Today show.
The messages or theme that most observers have taken away from these incidents have been grindingly predictable: The Internet changes everything, consumers have the power and big companies are running scared, etc.
I don’t know. Presumably people have had bad customer service expriences for many years. Seems like that wouldn’t have gotten you on the Today show a few years ago. Now it can. So what? Does that actually mean anything?
Has customer service gotten significantly worse? If so, why?
Does the problem underlying bad customer service have anything to do with consumers’ ability or inability to complain extremely loudly?
I had my own little service rage moment the other day, with Vonage. The whole reason I decided to switch to Vonage is that I was enraged with my Verizon service. And in the end, I’ve decided to stay with Vonage, even though I was unhappy (to put it mildly) with my customer-service experience. Earlier this year I had a service-rage blowout with Comcast, and when the dust settled, I was still unhappy, and still paying Comcast for cable service. It’s not like there are 50 other cable and phone companies I can choose from, and these companies know it.
According to the current Ad Age, Vonage spent $413 million on advertising spending last year. Comcast spect $425 million. Verizon (counting its wireless unit and other businesses) spent almost $2.5 billion. That’s astonishing.
One line of thought is: Well, these companies are going to figure out that all the advertising in the world won’t help if their service stinks, and redeploy their spending accordingly.
That makes sense, and it makes for a good Powerpoint presentation and all that. But what if it’s wrong? I got a pitch the other day from somebody about the power of negative word of mouth, and how it can really metastasize, people take it more seriously and act on it, etc. On the other hand, if you really extrapolated out the data they were pushing, then big companies that get complained about a lot would be going out of business right and left, or at least showing revenue declines. Is that happening? I’m ready for the real-world examples on this, because I’m really interested in the question.
I’m also interested in the service business itself. It’s easy to say: They should spend the money to give better service, but is it easy to execute? What’s it like to be the person on the phone listening to angry consumers all day? Consumers can be irrational, too. I suspect it’s an awful job. I suspect the turnover is high, and recruiting good people is difficult. I suspect most people doing that job hate it.
So what would it really take to fix the problem of annoying customer service? How much power does the typical customer-service rep even have in any given service-rage incident? I know that I’ve yelled at coustomer service reps who were really in absolutely no position — for reasons having to do with the structure of the company they worked for — to truly solve my problem.
Anyway, this is one of the things I’ve been thinking about. The other one is religion. More on that later.
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Reader Comments
“Has customer service gotten significantly worse? If so, why?”
I’ve had Vonage for three years. Customer service used to be slow, now it is almost unreachable due to the service’s explosion in popularity. I read that sales are growing at a monthly compound growth rate of 31%, but they have a yearly churn rate of around 25% — those appear to be poor, AOL-like numbers of dissatisfaction for a company (although I don’t know how this compares to other telcos or cellphone companies, and they *are* growing subscribers at a spectacular rate).
Thankfully, I only had one problem with them, albeit a serious one — without notice, Vonage ‘reset’ thousands of voicemail inboxes including mine, and deleted all saved voicemails in our mailboxes.
I didn’t know the standard reset-password I was expected to remember, and I couldn’t reach a human who understood my problem for three weeks. Until someone finally told me (by email) what that standard reset-password was I had to check my voicemail online, which was not a problem at home, but could not be done at work with much privacy (although it generated much curiosity). I would have turned off the voicemail from the Vonage website, but I needed even this hobbled service as I’d given away my home answering machine when I switched to Vonage.
“How much power does the typical customer-service rep even have in any given service-rage incident?”
Many reps probably have the power to hang up on customers who are disrespectful. Yell at a Starbucks barista and they have the power to point you to the door and politely recommend that it not hit your buttocks on the way out.
AOL been getting hit pretty hard lately.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=xIVZ9b0RgmY
Didn’t get to finish my post….
I think there’s a tipping point amplified by the internet.
When personal stories are compounded by MSM articles and TV pieces, real sales decrease. Customer service in this instance is intricately tied to public relations.
When Consumer Reports rates a product highly, sales tend to increase. When they report a spectacular failure and the company involved acts in a way that the consumer finds to be inappropriate, the company gets punished (e.g. the Suzuki Sidekick’s reported rollover problems, or the finger-pointing between Ford and firestone that resulted in Firestone’s subsumption into Bridgestone).
Wow, you are one early adaptor on Vonage. But I hope you didn’t buy the IPO.
Anyway, you may be right about the customer service/PR link. But in the absence of actual physical/mortal danger (like the suzuki example), it seems to me the pattern is: customer service is bad, then there’s a lot of negative PR, then nobody goes out of business and customer service gets worse. The only winners seem to be the consumer-rage web sites and projects that monetize the whole thing because people love to read about bad customer service. Well, the other winners are consultants and gurus who get large speaking fees to discuss how this is all an example of how the internet changes everything.
But maybe we’re on the cusp of real change.
I hope so.
Here’s one example of a poor customer service story (actually a scam) sweeping the ‘net, resulting in a company having to change its name:
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30917FA3D5B0C728DDDA80894DE404482
http://www.boingboing.net/2005/12/14/brooklyn_camerastore.html
Sometimes bad customer service is part of the allure. Two of my favorite eating spots — Boston’s Durgin Park and NYC’s Soup Kitchen Intl — are infamous for surly service. I witnessed several occasions of customers refused service by Al ‘Original Soup Man’ Yeganeh for taking too long to order, or fumbling for payment, or talking in line. I still remember the look of stunned incredulity of one woman when he kicked her off the line after she’d waited 30 minutes to order when she didn’t have her money ready but had several questions about the soup choices. He yelled at her to “come back when you learn how to be customer!” Everyone else on line cringed (or suppressed laughter), and promptly doublechecked that they had exact change.
Yeganeh’s holy pursuit of excellence in product conflicted pathologically with the necessities of normal trade, but in his case it only burninshed the reputation of the store as a funky, only-in-NY, must-see destination. With soup.
Durkin Park’s reputation for snotty waitresses turned into a marketing gimmick in the last decade, it seems.
Oh and the Vonage IPO? I stayed far, far away from that one. I like the company, but I don’t trust its President. I remember Datek Securities.