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.

Monetizing music

I actually don't think levies on memory is a terrible solution to the collapse of the music industry.

Let's play with some rough numbers, just for fun. Let's say you had a music consumer who used to spend an average of $150 a year on music--10 albums annually at $15 a pop. Now a compulsive downloader, he doesn't spend anything but his annual music downloads have a retail value of $4,000.

Right now, the music industry seems to think it's entitled to the $4,000. But if illegal downloading were to end tomorrow, so would his massive music consumption so he's soon be back to the $150 of spending again. So the question is not how to prevent this guy from downloading every song ever recorded, but how to extract $150 or more annually from this guy, no matter how much music he gets. It would be better if he paid more for more music, and there are probably ways of doing that, but for the moment we're just trying to restore an acceptable level of financial remuneration to the system. I think "the same as before" is more acceptable than zero.

But I'm not even sure "the same as before" is possible when your starting point is zero. So let's be even more realistic. I've read reports that artists have make as little as 30 cents per album, that $1 per album is a good deal. So under the new business model, why don't we give the artist $3 per album. With downloading as part of the new distribution model, let's keep marketing and administration costs to another $3 per album. Now our music fan is paying $60 for his 10 albums. Pro-rated as a fee applied to media that can hold music files, that's not an outrageous amount of money.

How do we get a little closer $150? License file-sharing services that meet certain criteria. Better search function, better speeds, fewer ads and spyware programs and less bogus files would lure people from illegal file-sharing to legal file-sharing. Or, because those terms are a little moralistic, unlicensed file sharing to licenced file sharing.

Even someone obsessed with "free" would give serious consideration to a monthly fee of $7.50 to legally download all the music he wants in a way that's as convenient as iTunes and that actually gives money directly to the artists he likes, much like how libraries pay fees to the creators of works that circulate. In fact, in paying for high-speed Internet access, he's already accepted the premise that downloading media files is going to cost him something each month. Why not 10 or 10 percent more, especially if he's getting value for it and is no longer a "criminal"?

The thing is to keep the price low. $7.50 montly is a much less dramatic departure from zero than, say, $30. Again, the industry is obsessed with the $4,000 worth of songs on his hard-drive, but they've got to let it go and focus on the conversion rate, rather than on their idea of justice.

By charging a (mandatory) fee on storage devices and by charging an (optional) monthly high-volume file-share fee, we can bring the same $150 a year back into the music industry. But, with online distribution and a de-emphasis on corporate systems, we've eliminated many of the "suit" and retail positions, giving the more of that money to artists instead. We give indie bands comparable access to larger acts, if they can do a good job of getting their name into the memories of music-searchers. If we have a system of licensed file-sharing services, we can keep track of who is getting downloaded and split the storage fee and monthly fee in a fair way. The distribution/marketing system becomes the finance department.

The corporate suits, though, are not interested in exiting stage right and so obsess over the $4,000 in "lost revenue," not realizing that that money is never going to be available to them, no matter how many court cases they launch. They've got to start with zero and build up, not start with "He's got our whole catalogue on his hard-drive!" and seek revenge.

Must every public space turn into Yonge-Dundas Square?

At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, I fired off this letter this morning to the mayor, Toronto's parks department and Councillor Adam Vaughan. What I should have wrote was that I actually enjoy the city's culture of festivals, just not on every square inch of city property.


To Mayor Miller, Councillor Adam Vaughan and the Parks Department,

When HTO Park opened two years ago, I started telling people, “Finally the city gets it. Not every public space has to be overprogrammed. Not every public space has to be full of people selling things. See, they have finally built a public space where you can just sit and talk and read or stare at the water or tan or watch kids play without a constant barrage of commercial messages and programmed activity.”

I spoke too soon.

Over the weekend the Toronto Waterfront Nautical Festival took over HTO park. It totally destroyed the character of the place. Some of the seating had been appropriated for commercial vendors. There was somebody using power tools. There was someone banging metal on an anvil. There was someone shouting about a pirate treasure hunt every five minutes or so. There was Shopsy’s selling BBQ animal parts and drinks. The beer garden—clearly demonstrating this city’s deep abiding love affair with the ugliest kind of temporary fencing—took up a significant chunk of the beach, blaring music at varying volumes throughout the afternoon, powered by a gas or diesel generator. There were 13 non-staff people in the beer garden when I looked, a number dwarfed by the people who were using the park for their own non-festival purposes and who could have certainly lived without the music or the beer garden This was totally a festival without an audience, primarily serving its own participants.

Three questions:
* Is it not possible to provide a public park in this city without filling it up with programming and, worse, obnoxious commercial activity? Is the highest and best use for all our public space always the Yonge-Dundas Square model?
* How much in fees did the city collect renting out HTO to the event organizers and the for-profit businesses who disrupted the vibe of this gem in order to sell their wares?
* Is there some kind of evaluation process that contrasts the city’s material gain (if any) from such events against the degradation of public space and the destruction of “the vibe” citizens have come to expect from a given public space?

Thanks for answering my questions. I’m just wondering, especially following the park’s occupation by Cirque Du Soleil a week earlier (which I had written off as an extra-special occasion), if it’s worth trekking down there any more or recommending HTO to others if loud (and, might I say, badly DJed) music, power tools and retail is now the vision for the park’s use.

Thanks for listening to my complaint and answering my questions.

Broke planet

When This American Life, broadcast on NPR in the U.S. but I listen to it via podcast, announced its series on the global financial crisis, I was a little skeptical. The show's quirky existentialism seemed better suited to stories about a guy who couldn't commit to buying a sofa or a mother who had lied to her daughter about being swapped with another child at birth. They shouldn't be doing... business stories.

Boy, was I wrong. Their coverage of what went bang on Wall Street has been fascinating and devastating. This week's edition (you can listen to online or download it free for a week, then it goes pay), The Watchmen, had me swearing aloud while I listened at the gym. What other show would call financial regulators all over the world looking for the one that was responsible for the AIG collapse?

Bacterial coincidence?

I was doing my semi-annual viewing of the CTV National News last night and noticed something strange--and it wasn't that Lloyd Robertson looked disoriented and a little constipated.

The kicker item was about how probiotics might help people with depression and chronic fatigue. Those are good bacteria that are now being pressed into service in supplements and some kinds of yogurt and other packaged food. The story was totally oversold--researchers studied only people with chronic fatigue, so any claims about depression or "other mental disorders" were purely speculative. As well, they only studied 39 people, a pretty small sample. They also failed to do much of a job explaining why having good bacteria in your gut would have any effect on your brain chemistry. And, hey, speaking of your gut: in the commercial break between the teaser and the item was an ad for Danone Activia yogurt, the one where a--how to describe it?--floating projection of a slim bare midriff floats over the stomach of a woman eating yogurt. It's good for you because it's... probiotic.

An eerily well-timed ad. It was also strange that in the examples of products that contain probiotics, Danone wasn't seen or mentioned, although it's the industry leader in shilling the stuff. You would have had to make a special effort to take them out. Was it possible that Danone knew the story was running and asked to be placed just before it? And that the editorial team knew the ad was running and made sure the product wasn't in the story? It seems like a big coincidence.

The other interesting twist is that in January 2008, many media outlets including CTV ran a story about the launch of a class action lawsuit in the U.S. against Danone, that claims the company's health claims for Activia are unproven. Ad Week just reported this week that the company is in settlement talks about the suit. So while Danone tries to make a deal about its dubious health claims, out comes a piece of research demonstrating that probiotics do improve your health--but in your brain, not your gut. So now they'll be able to run ads with Einstein's head floating over your head as you're eating yogurt.

Either way, Lloyd Robertson could use some yogurt.

The darkest hour

I hate to sound like an enviro-grinch, but I'm finding that the more well-known Earth Hour becomes, the more devoid of substance it becomes. I was brought up to turn off the lights, keep the door closed when the furnace was running and generally avoid needless electricity consumption. But the campaign does little to connect an hour of darkness with the desired outcomes. The campaign posters certainly dedicate more space to the sponsors than the intentions. It seems to have something to do with saving polar bears and Coca Cola--is it all polar bears or just the ones in the Coke commercials?

The World Wildlife Federation's website declares that the event "sends a very powerful message to government and world leaders that people want policies and regulations put in place that can achieve meaningful emission reduction to help fight climate change." How so? Does turning off the lights for an hour signal a desire for (considerably) electricity rates that reflect the real cost of power generation? A desire for rolling blackouts? Smart meters? For laws demanding more energy efficient appliances? For nuclear energy? For more wind mills? Who knows.

You can argue that any awareness of energy conservation is a good thing, but when you look at how many sponsorship dollars are being funnelled into this project, a feel-good hour of symbolism isn't a great return on investment. Organizers need to dump so more content into the event to help people connect the dots between one hour of conservation to a lifetime of eco-friendly consumption... make that sustainable consumption...er, make that less-destructive consumption. Any way you cut it, that's a lot of dots to connect.