I think I’ve mentioned before one particular service provider I’ve had for decades that’s constantly disappointing me. For some reason that’s completely lost on me—at least in recent years—this company has along the line picked up a reputation as being superb in the CX realm. To be honest, way back, they really were, but these days I think they’ve definitely fallen asleep at the wheel. Here’s something they do that ticks me and a lot of their Customers off as an example:
You can’t communicate with them.
Well, you can, but you have to do it exactly the way they want you to. I know there’s an old story about certain brands (including one I worked for a million years ago) that would actively hide their Customer Service phone number from their Customers. And I’ve even written previously about the outright funny way brands seem sometimes to deliberately tell their Customers to not bother even trying to communicate with them. But this brand in particular makes communication not impossible, but rather, a huge hassle each time.
First of all, they don’t have email addresses you can use to communicate with their service folks…not even when you’ve been assigned to one of them to work out your issue. They have an online messaging system on their website that offers limited ‘reasons for your communication’ that don’t cover all the reasons you’d like to potentially reach out. Then the form offers you limited characters in a text box to do all your communicating. Fortunately, the system also allows for you to upload documents and files and photographs, etc. What I’ve started doing is simply type out what I want to say in a Word document (as though it were in an email, ironically), save it as a PDF, and upload that. In the text box, I just write: “Please see the document I’ve attached and get back to me.”
Oh, yea, the “getting back” part…Naturally, they won’t email you, but rather, send out an un-repliable-to autogenerated email that directs you to their messaging center where you can see that someone has replied to you in their communication system. (In order to actually read what they’ve written to you, you have to log on, go through all the MFA nonsense, and search for the message within their system, naturally.)
Alternatively, you can call them of course. And with that comes a voice-‘recognition’ (which doesn’t “recognize” anything!) IVR that makes me hate this brand more every single time I ever have to call them. For years…literally years…I and others have complained to them about this. In fact, whenever I do have the unpleasant occasion to call them, I always take the opportunity after we’re done doing our business (the agents there are actually pretty awesome and friendly) to express how much I hate that IVR. It’s gotten that, recently, nearly every time I share this feedback, the agent seems to nod along and confide that, ‘yes, we hear that all the time from our Customers when they call.’ You do?! Why haven’t you fixed it?
Anyway, the point is that, this is a brand that makes communicating with them a chore. And here’s the thing: It doesn’t have to be that way. They’ve made a deliberate choice to not allow you to email them (surely they have email there, so there’s no way they don’t have email as an option), and they have a horrible technology in their IVR.
Now, it’s one thing (for example) to have no smartphone app, or have an app that doesn’t have really cool whiz-bang functionality that’d allow you to do certain things. Resources are what they are, and a lot of brands, to their credit, put more into what they actually do than putting a slick communications patina on it all. Sometimes certain things just can’t be helped.
But this isn’t that… This is a choice they’ve made. And it’s driving their Customers away.
They may also make some sort of excuse (privacy, regulatory, etc.), but that’s a reason to come up with a way to make it work, not simply to not allow it to be a pain in the neck for their Customers. And in the end, this sort of communication breakdown is simply this brand’s example of failing to be where their Customers are and meet their simple expectations. Other brands fall short in other ways.
How can you improve not only your communications and technology, but the choices you make when it comes to interacting with your Customers?
