He knew I’d had a bad experience and he promised he could help me. We reviewed what had gone wrong and what I needed, and sure enough, he knew what to do. Pretty soon we had everything set up as it should be, and he’d apologized again and again for the way the call center had handled things. He promised to follow up with the person who had not been able to successfully help me, and make sure she understood the right way to make Quicken work with their website. He gently mentioned that it was Intuit that causes the problem I encountered, but that was almost in passing and he took full responsibility for TD Bank’s not explaining what to do better the first time.

All in all, it was quite a nice save! And 24 hours later, another person from TD Bank called to offer me help, not being aware that Eric had already helped me. Not so organized there, but I’d rather have redundant follow up calls than none. So, I’ve gone back to being a basically content customer. Maybe I’m not so hard to please after all?

I used to have an account at Commerce Bank, which I liked. Then Commerce Bank’s president got in trouble, the bank got in trouble, and TD Bank bought Commerce. All was still well until last week, when TD Bank launched an “improved” online banking website.

Now I can’t get Quicken to connect with TD Bank any more. I followed the directions from TD Bank for re-establishing this connection, but what the directions say should happen doesn’t actually work. I’m stuck and can’t find a way around it.

So I called for help, which Commerce always was good at providing. I’ve been on hold for about half-an-hour now. My first call was declined — I was simply told by a recording to try later. Maybe I should have listened, but I want to get my banking done now, not later.

My second (current) call was answered promptly by a functionary who asked the nature of my call. I explained that Quicken won’t work with their online service any more. After 20 minutes on hold, my call was taken by a beleaguered customer service representative who was not familiar with technical details of online services. He needed to transfer me to online services.

Wait, why wasn’t my call sent there in the first place? He had no idea, and he wasn’t interested in hearing my complaints about my time having been wasted. He gave the perfunctory apology, but declined to pass my complaint along to where it could do some good for future callers. “It’s too big a system,” he explained.  He had no idea who to contact or complain to, and just wanted to get me off the line.

So I am still on hold as I write this. Starting to feel like Charlie on the MTA.

UPDATE:

It has been 90 minutes now. My call was finally, clumsily answered after an hour (there was silence for so long I thought they had disconnected me, then there was a fumbling around sound for a few seconds and finally a human voice spoke). I got transferred to the right department after 60 minutes on hold!

And then I felt like the straight man in “Who’s On First” as I tried to explain what keeps happening to me.

It took half an hour to get to her best solution for me, and I rejected it. Turns out TD Bank wants me to delete all my pending transactions that I scheduled on their website (not in Quicken). After I do that, I can follow the rest of their instructions and hope it works this time. And then I get to re-create the transactions that I deleted.

Instead, I created a new account in Quicken, while I was waiting on hold for an hour. And I found it pulled in my pending transactions just fine. The stupid thing is that now I have my data in two separate accounts. But after totally wasting 90 minutes on this exercise, I’d rather settle for that than go through more hoops.

TD Bank has a long, long way to go to convince me that I want to remain as their customer.

Plenty of Fish

Well, that’s a pretty blunt headline, isn’t it? This is one of the reasons I like having a blog: I have a platform to complain LOUDLY about companies that do wrong. This is what my old colleague, Keith Dawson, calls the “Super Empowered Angry Customer.” And that’s who I am today.

There’s a free online dating website called Plenty of Fish, at plentyoffish.com or pof.com, and for reasons that should be obvious, I decided to create a profile there. The site is fairly lame, frankly, but it’s free so I figured I would try it, anyway. Much to my surprise, within a few days I received the following “friendly” email with this Subject Line: Your Only Warning!

You have received this email because one or more of our rules have been violated.

If any of these rules are violated again, your account(s) will be removed from our website permanently.

1. Harassment – harassing or offending other users will result in your account being deleted

2. Nude/Inappropriate images – if you upload nude or inappropriate images, your account will be deleted

3. Duplicate/Fake Accounts – if you created more than one account for yourself or create a fake account, all of your accounts will be removed from our website

4. SPAM

5. Age – if we have reasons to believe you are under 18 years of age, your account will be deleted.

http://www.plentyoffish.com/terms.aspx

You’ll just have to trust me on this, but I did nothing offensive, harrassed no one, uploaded fully-clothed normal-looking pics of me and friends, did not spam anyone, and I sure as heck am older than 18.  I also only created one account, but the crummy website interface gave me a cryptic error message while I was creating the account and then it forced me to change from the username I had originally selected. I complied with the inane request and finished setting up my one and only account.

So, why did I get that email? I have no idea, unless the glitch when I signed up caused their system to create two accounts for me. More to the customer service point, what is any customer supposed to do when they get this email?

The fatal flaw that lands Plenty of Fish in the “sucks at customer service” column is their clear assumption that their users are bad people. The email they sent could only be effective when received by people who knowingly did one of those forbidden things. Plenty of Fish appears to hope that by acting like a stern and angry parent they will get creeps to stop acting like creeps. I really wonder how well that works.

My guess is that a very high percentage of people who get that warning email subsequently get banned from the site, as I did. Yes, I tried to log in a few days later and could not. Whatever sin Plenty of Fish thought I had committed, they must have thought I did it again, so they kicked me out.

Since I’d already decided after being treated like a criminal that I’d prefer to use another site, this did not bother me, but it sure did amaze me. See, when I got that threatening email from Plenty of Fish, I replied and asked what had triggered it, explaining that I was not aware of violating any of their policies.

Guess what the reply from Markus, the guy who runs Plenty of Fish, said? That’s right, nothing, since he did not reply. But that’s okay, Markus, you don’t have to answer email from me, since I have a blog and can tell you right here what I think of the way you treated me. And can at the same time tell my friends and anyone on the Internet who wants to search for Plenty of Fish, plentyoffish.com or pof.com and customer service. I’m happy to let you know right here what a lousy job you do with customer service.

You see, I’m not a criminal, I don’t intentionally violate terms of service, and I sure don’t act like a jerk on a dating website. So Markus’ “Your Only Warning!” email both insulted me and failed to give me any avenue for correcting whatever issue had caused my account to be flagged. If you’re interested in losing customers and visitors, Plenty of Fish sets a great example:

• assume your customers are out to get you
• threaten them the first chance you get
• refuse to tell them exactly what it is you think they did wrong
• ignore their responses and questions when they offer to make it right
• kick them out with no further explanation soon after.

We all could learn a great lesson in how NOT to treat customers from Plenty of Fish. That’s plentyoffish.com or pof.com, for those of you who haven’t been paying attention. After all, there are plenty of dating websites, too.

Super Empowered Angry Customers describes the shift in power that has taken place with the popularity of blogs, video sites such as YouTube, and websites such as “______CompanySucks.com” Companies have always claimed to listen to customers, but in practice many companies have routinely ignored many customers — and when this happened customers had little option beyond taking their business elsewhere.

Now they can take their business elsewhere AND cause a public relations disaster for the company that disappointed them. This has completely changed the dynamic between customers and companies, shifting the balance of power toward the customer to a never-before-seen degree.

So how shall we use our power, people? Will we use it for good or for evil? Every customer is not always right, and not every complaint is justified. It can be a very good thing to have more power, yet history is full of lessons about power being abused. Let’s try to use our power for good.

But, I should comment on Comcast, both the good news and the bad. First, the bad news: even though I told the customer service rep when I called to tell them I was moving that every time in the past when I have moved Comcast has screwed things up, and even though he assured me he had taken care of everything for me this time . . . you guessed it, it got screwed up. I waited two hours when I had far better things to do, and Comcast never showed up to set up my service.

So, I called, navigated my way through their annoying and illogical IVR (why, when I have cable, Internet and phone service with them, do they make me choose only one of them as the reason I am calling?), and reached Gabriel in the North Philadelphia call center. He told me I had no service call scheduled. I told him I did. He looked into it and confirmed that I had, indeed, talked to someone on Monday, but that same someone had not scheduled an appointment in the system and had not turned on my new service, either. I filled Gabriel in on my sad tale of Comcast’s repeated incompetence every time I move, and he asked for my patience while he worked on the issues.

While on hold, I contemplated calling Verizon to see about switching to FiOS. It’s supposed to be very speedy, I hear. Then Gabriel came back to ask me for more time while he continued to work on my issues. “Sure,” I said, thinking nasty thoughts about Comcast and all the boxes I still needed to pack before the movers came the next morning.

Finally, Gabriel finished and filled me in on what he had been doing. He had set up a new appointment for me two days later — the soonest he could schedule it. “OK,” I said. And he had gotten approval to waive all my installation fees. “Not bad,” I thought. And he knocked $20 off my monthly bill. “Nice!” And he extended my free HBO and Starz promotional deal. “Very nice!”

I have to hand it to Gabriel. I sure hated wasting two hours waiting for the Comcast guy to not show up, and I was truly fed up with three times in a row of Comcast messing up my service move (how hard should this be? People move all the time!). But I have to admit, I felt adequately compensated by the concessions Gabriel offered me in exchange for my inconvenience.

My first thought was that Comcast may really be coming around and learning about customer service. And then I thought again. Most likely Comcast is learning what it’s like to compete for customers. FiOS is in my area and I had a Verizon guy at my door a couple of months ago pushing the service. As a customer, I say, it’s about time! Competition pushes companies to focus on delivering for the customer better than anything else ever invented.

Let’s say the person in charge of your retail operations does the following every single day:

• Puts up a sign indicating which of five doors customers should use.
• Locks that door.
• Randomly unlocks another door.
• When someone figures out which door to use, he runs out and kicks them in the groin, then locks the door.

read more | digg story

Well, now I am! I loved this two-part series Jay did so much that I asked him to do a presentation on this topic at ICMI’s Dallas Call Center Demo and Conference last week. I think the live session was even better than the articles, because of the audience participation and the dialogue that took place, and just because Jay’s a fun and professional speaker.

These articles make an excellent companion to Jodie Monger’s article that I just wrote about, Are You Guilty of Survey Malpractice? She delves into the details of survey practices and Jay uncovers a whole lot of other factors that you’ve likely never considered.

Surveys alone do not reflect true customer satisfaction levels. Behavioral metrics hold the key to managing dissatisfaction.

I love the way Jay pussy-foots around touchy issues so delicately, as he does here:

There are three main reasons why the information you get from these surveys is only vaguely reflective of true satisfaction levels:

1. The view of what constitutes a cus­tomer is much too narrow;

2. Evaluations are heavily slanted toward input rather than behavior; and

3. Some of you are manipulating the hell out of the data.

He should have been a diplomat instead of a call center consultant

Both articles are essential reading if you really want to understand the gap between all the glowing internal customer satisfaction reports and the constant complaints reported about widespread customer dissatisfaction. You can stick your head in the sand or you can learn the truth.

Measurement programs must meet certain scientific criteria to be statistically valid with an acceptable confidence level and level of precision or tolerated error. Without these considerations, you are guilty of Survey Malpractice. To defend your program with “it has always been this way” or “we were told to do a survey” is not sufficient. Research laws adhered to in academia apply to the business world. A deficient survey yields inaccurate data and results in invalid conclusions no matter who conducts it.

How hard is it to come up with a bunch of questions and create a survey? That’s what most of us think, and if you just want some quick and informal feedback, that’s fine. But your customer satisfaction measurements are another story altogether. Jodie explains seven warning signs of “survey malpractice”:

1. Measuring too many things
2. Not measuring enough things
3. Measuring questions with an unreliable scale
4. Measuring the wrong things or the right things the wrong way
5. Asking for an evaluation after memory has degraded
6. Accuracy and credibility of service providers and product vendors
7. Wiggle room via correction factors

(See the article for the explanation associated with each.)

Few performance metrics are as critical to contact center success as first-contact resolution (FCR); unfortunately, few performance metrics are also as misunderstood.

As I’ve already written (First Call Resolution: Great Principle, Hard to Apply), FCR is simple to grasp but far from simple to put into place in a meaningful way. As Greg put it:

According to the recently published ICMI Member Report on First-Contact Resolution, 79.2 percent of contact centers consider FCR to be either “critical/indispensable” or “very important.” The trouble is, many centers have implemented FCR initiatives too hastily, without taking time to fully understand the intricacies of the metric — i.e., what it actually means and how best to measure it, as well as what processes and tools the center should have in place to achieve a high FCR rate.

Check it out!

first call resolution call center metricscall center management

The bottom line, as I have said many times before (see, for example, Just Answer the Phone Quicker!) and will say many times again, is that those of us in the call center industry have the power to change the negative perception the public has of us. It’s going to take resolve and determination, and recognition that customer service is important enough to do right that spending money on it is a wise investment.