I recently had a ridiculous interaction with one of our household service providers. I had a general question about one of their policies and went online to check out their FAQs to see if I could get an answer. A usual pet-peeve of mine, that endeavor was fruitless (whoever determines which questions are “frequently” asked clearly spends no time considering questions people may have), but for another article altogether.
So I engaged the chat function.
Navigating beyond the bot, which had little more than the FAQs to share (pet-peeve number two…are we keeping track of other articles I need to remember to write?), I got to a person and posed my query.
The actual person with whom I was chatting immediately asked me for my account number to verify me.
Nah, that’s okay, I said. I’m not inquiring about my account or any activity or charge or anything like that. I just have a question about your policies. Can you tell me, …?
I’d be happy to help, came the reply…I just need to verify you in the system first.
No, you don’t need to verify me. I’m not asking about anything to do with me or with my account. I just have a general question for you about you, not me.
We went around like this for a while until I finally acquiesced and let this poor agent off the hook to look me up in their system. He was able to offer me a pretty quick response to my question and in the end, he even acknowledged that it had nothing to do with my account, but assured me that, he’d log our interaction and that I had some banal question right there anyway. Well, thanks, I guess.
Why did this brand do that? Why hassle me with all my specific details just to answer a general question? What’s worse, what if I hadn’t had my account number readily available and had to look it up just to get past the unnecessary step you’re imposing on me? The brand is making it worse.
Now, in fairness, if I had been asking a question specific to, say, the particular service plan we have, due diligence by the help center of identifying me would be helpful in case perhaps I thought I had one plan but really had another (“Ah, I see…that’s why I’m not receiving what I’d expected: I’m not on the plan I should be on.”) and it’d actually save me some runaround.
But no…I was 100% asking a question about this brand irrespective of the type or level of service I was paying for.
So, the whole rigmarole was entirely useless and something imposed on me by the brand, making this experience more frustrating than it needed to be.
Some may consider that this is a process issue: They have a process whereby the agent can’t help you out until your credentials are verified. But in this instance, it wasn’t really a process problem, as the information (about them, not me) was right there at the agent’s fingertips. He didn’t need to know anything about me to access his own system to find the answer (and it’s likely he knew the answer organically anyway, having worked there for a while and likely having fielded this very question about his company’s offerings before).
No, this was a policy problem.
Their agents aren’t allowed to help Customers unless they’re logging their credentials. Surely this is driven by some sort of effectiveness or efficiency system (i.e., ticket logging and such), and is used to roll up into some sort of accountability mechanism. I can appreciate that.
But re-read the first seven words of that previous paragraph.
If there’s anything in your policies that begins (or can be interpreted to begin) that way, you can have the greatest systems and processes, and even the greatest agents on the planet! But still, the problem is you…you’ve put up barriers to prevent your agents and front-line team members from helping your Customers. It’s not always easy, and oftentimes it costs you a bit. But you need to remove all those barriers nonetheless.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Your Customers don’t care about your rules and why you do things the way you do. They want their problems solved and their questions answered and your goods and/or services delivered properly and in line with your Brand Promise. Anything that stands in the way of that is an issue you should be fixing.
