Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Customer service in an information vacuum

Last year when I wrote a little piece for Reader’s Digest Canada about how to get better customer service, one of the key themes was keeping your cool.

In retrospect, I feel a little weird about that advice since, personally, I’ve found that losing my cool—at least just a bit—can work wonders. Especially when most customer service agents are so intent on following a script, they treat anything the customer tells them as a nuisance not to be believed. Getting emotional is risky, but it can be a way to get an employee to abandon a templated approach and listen in order to figure out the real problem—and solve it.

Last week I heard weird sounds from behind my house. I got left the work I was doing on my computer and went outside to investigate. In the dark I could see a family of raccoons, screeching and screaming at the top of a utility pole, as if they had been chased up there by something. They were inching nervously out onto the communications wire that runs along the back of my yard, which butts up against the yards of several of my neighbours. I had never seen raccoons walk on wires like that before. It was quite a drama.

I went back to my computer to discover my Internet was out and that my phone wasn’t working. The next morning the phone was back, though too static-y to have a comfortable conversation.

To me the cause was pretty obvious. My Internet drops out periodically in the fall and spring when the squirrels are in a frenzy, and my phone line gets mildly static-y when it’s raining. The weight of the raccoons seems to be the last straw for a communications line that was moody at the best of times. When a Bell technician visited last year when I changed my Internet plan, he told me the line was in bad shape and should be replaced, though the technician I scheduled to do that never showed up.

But trying talking about raccoons and chronic static problems to customer service people at my phone company, Primus. With each of the nine calls (or maybe more—I stopped counting) I had to make to solve the problem and with each of the two technicians who showed up, it was almost impossible to convince them that my theory—a raccoon-damaged line—could possibly be correct.

Had I restarted my modem? Yes, more than a dozen times. Was the cable to the modem less than three feet long? Yes, for more than a decade. Yes, there were filters on the phone line and, as far as I knew, they hadn’t dematerialized the night of the raccoon drama.

I understand that a lot of telecom customers don’t understand tech stuff. I understand that if I hadn’t seen the raccoons on the line that I wouldn’t have had any idea what might have caused the Internet outage and the phone static—it was an unusual piece of evidence to have. I understand that telecom companies want to troubleshoot simple things before investing time and money into fixing hardware. But to be disbelieved, dismissed and condescended to for the better part of a week was exasperating.

After a couple of days, the phone static became episodic; only 70 per cent or so my calls were inaudible. So I had one customer service agent tell me that my line was just fine because they could hear me just fine, so if I was still having an Internet problem—had I reset the modem? She got angry with me when I interrupted her wildly inaccurate description of my problem. The fact that I had successfully been using my phone and Internet for years, had seen the line being damaged and had talked to several other agents, some of who agreed with me, was irrelevant to her. She had her script and she was sticking to it. By this time, I had realized that the customer service ticket for my problem was wildly inaccurate, failing even to note that I had no Internet service. Yet for everyone I talked to, this ticket was the truth and I, as the customer, was an obstacle to the truth. It was customer service as theatre, not problem-solving. But what a depressing show it was.

Finally a Bell technician arrived. My telecom, Primus, rents Bell’s lines so Bell is kind of the landlord in this situation, Primus is the tenant and I, apparently, play the role of subletter (no wonder nobody listened to me). The technician agreed the outside lines were static-y and in bad shape. Yes, they should be fixed. But he needed to go up a pole in my neighbour’s yard to get to the lines and my neighbour’s yard was locked. I needed to schedule another technician to visit when I would be sure there’d be access. (It turns out the Bell technician hadn’t bothered to knock on the door of my neighbour who was home and would have readily given him access.)

When the second technician arrived the next day, it was like none of my previous conversations or the previous technician’s visited had ever happened. I had to tell him four times that the Internet went out moments after raccoons stepped onto the wire. He didn’t seem to believe me. Had I restarted my modem? At the time of his visit, the phone wasn’t especially static-y. He fiddled with some switches on the hub down the street, took note of the absence of static and told me the problem was fixed. If I was still having Internet problems, which I was, I’d have to call tech support again—the line was fine.

That’s when I lost it. Didn’t the guy from yesterday file a report? Didn’t you read it? If the problem is intermittent, as I’ve said innumerable times, then of course, the line may be fine right now—that doesn’t mean it’s fixed. Why doesn’t my not having Internet and having a static-y phone for days outweigh the 10 minutes you’ve been here? Why can’t you just believe me and fix the problem I’m describing to you? Why can’t you just fix the problem? Why can’t you just fix the problem?

As I was pleading with him, the Bell guy fell silent, walked away from me, got in his van and drove away as I stood there, aghast. Primus called me on my cell to tell me the problem had been fixed. “How would you know?” My Internet was still out and the static had already come back on the phone line. But the technician had already called to close the ticket and the ticket had been closed.

Then I realized what bothered me even more than not being listened to as a customer—that the various customer service agents, tech support people, dispatchers, managers and technicians don’t talk to or listen to each other except to report “Job done, clear the ticket.” Each interaction had taken place in a vacuum, as if no information had previously been collected or changed hand. Today’s technician doesn’t build on the work of yesterday’s; he starts from scratch.

But if companies aren’t going to listen to their customers, their employees should at least be listening to each other. This failure to absorb and share information is not only infuriating for customers, it costs companies money as they chase easy solutions to non-problems even though, after more phone calls and more false steps and more aborted technician visits, they will eventually have to fix the real problem—or lose the customer.

My story has something of a happy ending. After my emotional pleading with the second Bell technician to please, please, please fix the cable, he had driven away. I went back in the housing feeling totally defeated. Who needs phone and Internet anyway?

Fifteen minutes later, I saw the technician up on top of the pole, right where the raccoons had been four days earlier. He strung new cable into my backyard.

The technician had taken pity on a desperate man, had listened to the desperate man and, against all conventional wisdom, taken action.

Less than 15 minutes later, the static was gone and my Internet worked perfectly. The customer who had been dismissed at every step of the way had been right all along.

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