That Was The Week That Was – My Customer Service Experience Hell
In my last blog post I talked about my new weekly commute between Southern and Northern California. As an established homeowner for so long I had all but forgotten what it was like to deal with a range of consumer service providers as I re-established myself in Sunnyvale. And what a long week that first week was.
I had forgotten that in the USA, the concept of electronic bill payment is still somewhat of a novelty that you need to ask for. I had forgotten that you need to stay home and wait on people who always say “We’ll be there between 6am and midday” when you know full well that they will arrive at five minutes to noon.
It was a hot worldwide, and my countrymen back in the UK were carrying out the rioting and looting, which I don’t wish to make light of, but that seems to happen every 10-15 years in Britain and has done since medieval times. Anyway, I digress. It was hot, and I was trying to get let’s say a ‘certain appliance’ up and running in my apartment. I needed help, and I wanted to talk to someone, because that’s my preferred interaction method when it comes to customer service channels, but I could I find a phone number? It took me forever to unearth one on their website, making me tense before I began.
Some 40 minutes later it turned out I was not speaking to who I thought I was, but a third party who couldn’t sell me what I wanted. “I will need to transfer you to another company, sir,” said the agent. “Ok, thanks,” said I, although I was already panicking because I feared (quite rightly as it turned out) what often happens next in these scenarios. I went on hold and after a few minutes the phone went dead, disconnected. Has that ever happened to you?
Not to be deterred I called back in. The new agent asked me all the same questions. Even after the initial social security and childhood pet’s name stuff it was starting over again; no record of my last call. Blood temperature rising. This agent couldn’t help either and informed me that the pricing I saw on the web site was not offered by this company, even though they shared the same name. How strange. “I will need to transfer you to the web sales team, sir.” Panic starting to set in. The good news is that I was transferred this time, the bad news was nothing else got transferred with me and my close on one and a half hour journey to-date had, it appeared to me, all been for nothing; I needed to start over again with the last four digits of my social number.
Did I get what I wanted? Eventually. Did I receive a good customer service experience? Definitely not. Would I have gone elsewhere if there were an option? Absolutely. Was I hot? You bet!
What I take away from this is all about context and the need for customer experience management to ensure that context is-
a) not lost between channels
b) not lost between agents
c) not lost between departments or even companies.
It’s fundamental!
I’m a firm believer in what Gartner calls Context-Aware Computing, the quality of context (QoC) and how context can improve customer experience management. Research by Anind K. Dey, G. D. Abowd and others defines context as “any information that can be used to characterize the situation of entities (that is, a person, place or object) that are considered relevant to the interaction between a user and an application, including the user and the application themselves. Context typically is the location, identity and state of people, groups, and computational and physical objects. Context can be derived from a wide variety of systems and networks – especially from, but not limited to, the Web.”
By the same token, “context-aware computing studies how these entities use information that characterizes the situation of a person, place or object to adapt their behavior or the content they provide.” And this is the essence of it, the ability to adapt and travel between interactions, which for Gartner is an architectural essential “poised to be a game changer for enterprises that want to increase customer intimacy and improve the effectiveness of business processes and collaboration.”
When we created our next-generation solution, KANA Service Experience Management (SEM), we not only based it on the best of all our existing multi-channel applications delivered within a single end-to-end platform and agent desktop, but we’ve built it on an agile and adaptable context-aware service-oriented architecture (SOA) to ensure that it will preserve context right across the customers’ journey. Granted, there are security and legal reasons for re-requesting the last four digits of my social number, but beyond that I expect the rest of my journey to be a seamless and contextual service experience.
(James Norwood is CMO, KANA)
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