I recently had a series of not-terrible-but-still-irritating experiences with a major service provider. I’m a pretty loyal Customer of this company, but a few of their new procedures and rules have made dealing with them much more cumbersome and frustrating. What’s more, their Customer Support staff has been empowered really only to express their sympathy and re-explain the same rules that I had just told them were a burden and an aggravation. (Always poor form for a brand, by the way, in response to a Customer outlining what’s so bad about a policy or process, to turn around and extoll how wonderful the new annoyance is, as though the Customer should be grateful for having been inconvenienced…a story for another day.)
Anyway, as I’d said, I really do like this brand, and as such, have a sort-of investment in their remaining a good company to do business with (I much prefer them to most of their competitors). So, not being content with the shabby treatment, being a CX guy myself, and truly wanting them to get better, I shot off a quick note (actually, when I replied to the CS email, I copied him) to their new CXO.
A little background: This brand had recently (in the past few months) suffered a somewhat viral episode based on a (different) frankly horrible new policy of theirs that had raised hackles of many Customers. The CXO is new, the industry seems to presume, in part to handle such debacles and recover from this type of mistake. (That they haven’t rescinded that policy yet shows either how much he’s got on his plate, the pushback he’s receiving from his peers in leadership, or even perhaps his disagreement with his entire Customer base that it’s a bad policy in the first place.) That these other, new, inconvenient policies (the ones about which I was complaining) have only recently been added on top of their previously called-out issue bodes poorly for the direction of things.
But I’m not here today writing about these policies per se. Check out what happened when I wrote this guy:
It turns out I’m somewhat tangentially connected to him—he’s a 2nd degree connection on LinkedIn, but who knows, really, how valid any of those “connections” are? So, I figured I’d add him to the chain as a professional courtesy and in an effort to demonstrate what his actual Customers were experiencing, which I figured, any CXO—especially one new to the brand—would want and welcome. I have quite a few acquaintances and friends who’ve worked (even recently) for the brand, so I knew the corporate protocol for email addresses (john.doe@, jdoe@, etc.). After verifying through RocketReach (a great resource, by the way, when you’re trying to contact an executive), I tacked on two versions of what I figured should be his email address as a cc: to the email.*
I immediately got a bounce-back from both email addresses I used for him.
I’d written previously about the irony of some brands who literally have an email address titled “donotreply@”, and have referred a couple times to how executive escalations work…that they’re not even necessarily read by the executive to whom you think you’re writing, let alone handled by some elite League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, dispatched personally by the CEO. When, as a CX practitioner, I reach out directly to a fellow CX leader, I realize I may have to run the same gauntlet as that angry man out there, shaking his fist at the clouds. That I’m coming from a collegial position doesn’t magically put me at the front of the line or top of the inbox.
But think about this:
This guy was hired by a brand already suffering lagging Customer Experience, in part, literally to represent the Customer to the enterprise as a whole. And they seem to have deliberately chosen to give him an email address that cannot be divined from what information Customers could otherwise be expected to be able to find in the wild. The one guy in the entire corporation who should be interested in—and regularly be exposed to—what Customers are experiencing has effectively been shielded from ever having to be contacted by any of them directly without first being filtered through the system itself. What an own-goal!
Now, just to reiterate: I really like this company and have preferred them over their (many) competitors for quite a while. Frankly, normally, I’d be writing an article in my series of “Getting CX Right” about them (where I name names of those who do things well). And surely, I’m not in the practice of writing articles naming those who do poorly (thus I’m not exposing them here). In fact, it’s out of an admiration for this brand, and in gratitude for many years of great CX (and as a professional courtesy to their new CXO), that I even bothered to help them out by emailing him with my thoughts.
But I’m nearly at the end of my tolerance for their petty little new irritating policies that make dealing with them such an abrasive experience. That they’ve effectively insulated the guy who was brought in (one presumes) specifically to address their eroding CX from exposure to their Customers’ feedback is not a good sign for them. It’s chef’s-kiss irony, really.
*Here seems an apropos place to mention that some savvy, Customer-centric companies (like the one for which I served as a CX executive) even go so far as to have their IT departments deliberately create a bunch of fake “alias” email addresses to match a panoply of potential incorrect versions of what that format should be—you can imagine there are a lot more ways email addresses may be formatted—for all of their C-Suite executives, not to mention “president@”, “ceo@”, and even “executive@” and others. These emails typically don’t go to the executive in question, but rather are funneled to the executive escalation team and still get treated with that elevated level of care. It’s left as an intellectual exercise to the reader to determine if the brand I’m talking about here is either savvy or Customer-centric.
