Customer Service - From Promise to Performance

As I've mentioned (see, Abbott & Costello below), an airline recently lost a large suitcase of mine with most of my favorite clothes. I'm not a clothes horse, so I couldn't just reach into the closet for more of the same. The last three weeks has been a bit of a forced march through America's shops as I travel from city to city (DC, Boston, NY, DC, Tucson in the last 20 days). I work during the day and troll the stores at night before they close, desperately seeking items that fit and look well.

Shoes are a big deal in my life. I spent an adventurous and athletic youth, but the only broken bones I've ever had were one in each foot (different events). I had worn flat or low-heeled shoes ever since. Just this summer, I bought my first pair of high heeled shoes for work in twelve years. And, in the lost suitcase, were those beautiful black suede Stewart Weitzman shoes (tiny little cut out squares, pretty nickel buckle with a tasteful small, dark rhinestone) that I had owned for one week!

Yesterday, while standing in a store across town, I called the store where I had bought these gorgeous shoes and explained my loss. I also explained that I could not remember which size I had bought -- the whole size or the half size (such is the mystery of women's shoe sizing). A sympathetic saleswoman put me on hold and then reported back that she had the shoes in both sizes. Because of my dilemma, she agreed to put both pairs on hold until I could get there. I was delighted by such service and decency.

I spent the rest of the day shopping for other missing items, secure in the knowledge that I could replace my wonderful Weitzman shoes. I waltzed into the store twenty minutes before the mall closed, secure in the knowledge that I could dawdle a little over both pair. My mood evaporated when I looked across the service counter and saw only one shoe box where two should have been. And, I became downright despondent when I discovered that the store had four pair in the whole size and zero pair in the half size. You can guess which would fit -- the nonexistant half size of course!

It will be a while before I patronize that store again. I'm never good natured about bait-and-switch selling, but in this circumstance I think it's particularly inappropriate. The movie "Miracle on 34th Street" may be 50+ years old, but it still has the right message - your customers will be much more appreciative (and loyal) if you're honest with them when you haven't got the stock.

Timing, of course, is everything. 

Walgreens (according to my local pharmacist) has just implemented new technology in its stores that automatically counts pills and fills bottles. 

The wrinkle? 

The only bottles the machine can use are about twice the size of the bottles my medicine used to come in.  Leaving aside the environmental issues of so much wasted plastic (my 30 tiny pills sit at the bottom of the bottle look like the last few bingo balls in the cage), it's also a packing issue.  The Transportation Security Administration has decided that all medication should be carried in the separate labeled bottles in which they were sold. 

My heart goes out to those on multiple medications who will have to give up a pair of shoes or some similarly sized object to make space for the nearly empty bottles.

I love Abbot and Costello's "Who's on First" routine, but it's not nearly so funny when the conversation is for real.

On Labor Day, Monday, September 4th, US Airways lost my suitcase. 

This is a fairly significant crisis for me, as the bag contained:
5 suits,  9 blouses,  2 Coach belts,  4 pairs of shoes, a new briefcase, a new pair of slacks, a new pair of pajamas,
a small purse, brand new cosmetics (to replace what TSA won't allow on a plane), a sweater, and assorted smaller items.  I'm not much of a clothes horse, so this represents a big chunk of my wardrobe.  And, while I don't buy a lot, most of what I buy is top quality, purchased at a discount, through lots of careful looking.

Over the past five days, US Airways has provided untold entertainment to my co-workers who can hear my end of telephone conversations with customer service, outsourced to reps in Central America.  Here are the highlights:

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Phone message on my cell phone:  "I'm calling to inquire about the status of your bag."

Me returning the call:  "Hi.  You called and left me a message.  Are you asking me about the status or do you have status about the bag?"

Answer:  "We are waiting for the updates about your bag."

Me:  "Updates?  You have an update?"

Answer:  "Can you hold on?"  ... very long hold ... "I don't have any information"

Me:  "You said updates, what did you mean?"

Answer: "We are waiting for the updates"

Me;  "What updates?"

Answer:  "About your luggage"

Me: "Do you have information?"

Answer:  "We don't have any information..."

Me:  "Why did you call me?"

Answer:  "We send a message"

Me:  "I am returning the message"

Answer: "No.  We send a message on the computer"

Me:  "Who are you sending a message to?"

Answer:  "the airports"

Me:  "What airports?"

Answer: "Both airports"

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Later ....

Answer:  "You should call back in an hour"

Me:  "why should I call back in an hour?"

Answer: "We are waiting for the updates"

Me:  "I have been waiting for information for 100 hours.  Do you know something that makes you think there will be information in an hour?"

Answer:  "No"

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Ok, the conversations weren't recorded (on my end), but this is pretty close to exactly what happened!

US Airways, please take pity.  It's bad enough that my luggage is lost; that your dollar limit for claims is significantly less than what the items cost and only a fraction of what they'll cost to replace now that I don't have the luxury of time to find them on sale or at a discount; and that I'm working all day and shopping all night to have clothes for work the next day.  Don't make the next  person wait six days (as I did) to  finally  hear from someone with sufficient English language skills to make it clear that the bag is well and truly gone.

Part of the time, I live in a house at the edge of civilization.  This means, among other things, that I have a septic tank.  For those of you who (like me) grew up in big cities, a septic tank is what you have instead of a sewer.  All the waste in the house goes out a sewage pipe to a big container buried in the ground and the big container has pipes draining the fluid out into the surrounding ground.  Every couple of years, the tank fills up with the solid waste and someone has to pump out the tank and take the crud away.  Don't worry, there's no smell, the tank is typically six feet or so below ground.

In any event, today was the day to have the tank pumped.  I've always liked my septic company.  They're friendly and can usually come out within a day or two.  But today, they offered something new -- to treat the tank with CCLS, a special chemical that I could buy for just $69 a gallon and I would only need two gallons.  Let me say, for the record, that I am tired of up-selling.  Despite all marketing theories to the contrary, I will not buy more stuff than I intended if you just keep battering me with offers.  If your destiny is a higher commission, you're unlikely to meet that destiny through me.  So, when they wanted to sell me something new, my radar immediately went off.

I went in the house and looked up the chemical on the web.  It is sold by a company in Cape Cod that sells to distributors and neither the company nor most of its distributors list a price.   I'm pretty handy with a Boolean search and I ultimately found a description on eBay saying that the stuff usually sells for $30 a bottle and comes in boxes of four.  I found a second site by a distributor offering the chemical for $125 for the four-bottle box plus $16 for shipping.  So, I was reasonably confident that $30-$35 per bottle (delivered) is a fair price.

When the young man running the pump came back to my door to ask if I wanted the CCLS at $69 a bottle, I told him that I had found it for about half on the internet.  "Not in this state," he smirked with a wide grin, implying that they were the only distributor.  (I like them too much to think he was admitting to price-fixing.)  But, he'd missed the point.  There wasn't any sort of emergency or time  sensitivity to the purchase.  If he hadn't been so smug, or he'd offered any sort of plausible explanation for his 100% mark-up above retail, he might have made the sale.  

Today, I opened my mailbox to find a particularly unpleasant surprise.  There was an invitation to an investment seminar with free food at a top tier restaurant.  So what's wrong with that? 

It was addressed to my husband's ex-wife.  We are talking about mail addressed to someone who has been divorced from the resident for nearly twenty years.  We are talking about mail addressed to someone who never lived in this house or the two prior houses owned by the resident.  This is mail addressed to someone who has never lived within 2,000 miles of this house.

So, how does this happen?  Some data vendors don't do a careful job of "cleaning" their data.  When they were married, my husband and his then-wife were appropriately listed as sharing an address.  When they separated, the data company continued to list them at the same address wherever either one of them moved.  The data company never integrated and analyzed their data, in which case they would have seen that this woman still was obtaining credit at their old address.  They never noticed that there are no records of her taking credit, registering a vehicle, or buying property at any of the addresses associated with her former husband.  More importantly, they never noticed that he was establishing credit and registering assets as community property (meaning married or like married) with another woman (me).

While keeping this woman in the database might give the data company one more name to sell, it wasn't very effective for the customers down the chain.  The local AIG representative paid for names of prospects, but it didn't get one in this case.  Instead, it paid money to annoy a true prospect.   Sorry guys....

One of my pet peeves is being "held hostage" on the phone.  When I call a store or 800 number it's often because I'm trying to save time.  Yet, almost all of them now refuse to answer my questions or even put a service person on the line until after I've verified my home address, phone number, and email address.  As time ticks away, I am using it to tell them what they want to know and getting none of the information that I want to know.  This utter lack of respect for the customer annoys me.

And, sometimes, I just want information and don't want to identify myself.  I have this recurring image of standing in a supermarket aisle, asking a clerk the price of a box of cereal.  The clerk tells me store policy won't allow him to give me the price until I verify my information.  Sounds absurd, yes?  So, why does phoning somehow change the balance dramatically?

I've tried lots of end runs around this problem.  Today, I said to the operator, "nothing has changed."  Part of the reason I get so frustrated is that I've owned the same home for nine years and had the same phone number for thirteen years.  Nothing has changed; nothing will change.  Yet, she still went on to repeat my home address, phone number, AND email address.  When I challenged the logic of asking after I'd said nothing has changed, she nearly burst into tears and explained that she would "get written up" if I didn't have the conversation according to her script.

A word of warning to all the companies engaged in this practice: My tolerance level for foolishness tends to be lower than most but, eventually, even your best natured customers are going to grow weary of this practice.  The paradox -- which provides ultimate justice in my book -- is that the most frequent customers will get annoyed first.

A colleague recommended Pip Coburn's book, "The Change Function: Why Some Technologies Take Off and Others Crash and Burn."  It looked terrific so I decided not to wait and have it shipped home, but to buy it right now while traveling.  I did buy the book, but now I want to know why B&N's in-store price is 25% more than its online price?  Is that really the differential for the brick and mortar business?  Or, is it the penalty for impulse purchases? 

And, can anyone tell me why the B&N sales clerk in the Georgetown store claimed to be checking the internet and then insisted that the difference in price was for the paperback version?  There is no paperback version.

Guess I'll be shopping Amazon until I cool down....

Can't say I'm surprised by the Dell battery recall. 

I've had two Dells overheat.  Over the course of about a year, I had a Latitude overheat to the point that I could feel the heat through a stack of rolled up Wall Street Journals and it began to discolor the underside of my wrists.  Then, I bought an X1 which essentially fried its harddrive. 

To its credit, between the two computers, Dell replaced a fan, a motherboard, an entire laptop, and a hard drive. 

To its discredit, customer service was a nightmare.  Having paid for "gold" tech support didn't preclude:

-         being placed on interminable hold (more than 30 minutes in some cases);

-         dealing with a “voice recognition” system that could not “hear” me using any tone except shouting;

-         technicians who didn't know the products (i.e., couldn’t agree among themselves whether the X1 has a fan or is passively cooled);

-         leaving customers in the lurch (although replacement parts are sent express for “gold” contract holders, there’s no loaner or other option when the part is out of stock);

-         the assumption that customers who had bought laptops with operating systems and software pre-installed would manage to install those items on their own when Dell replaces the hard drive or computer; and

-         foreign techs with unintelligible accents (as someone spending the year with foreign nationals, I feel particularly qualified to say that these techs could not be understood).

I'm thinking about starting a new site just to let people vent about the worst of customer service. 

How many times have you called a company recently only to get a recording that says that the company is receiving "unusually high call volumes" and that your wait could be "longer than normal"?  Wouldn't it be great if the American economy really were that super-charged? 

This week's winner of the insanely long hold contest was the folks at Adobe.  According to the timer on my phone, I waited 34 minutes to talk to customer service. 

Amazingly, this is not the longest hold time I've recorded.  During "peak periods" I've recorded longer waits for an opportunity to cancel my RCN service; to make an America West reservation (pre-merger); and to reach Dell's Gold technical support when my laptop harddrive fried.

If you've waited longer, please write and tell me about it!

I spent a lot of this past year in Boston.  In nearly every taxi, the front seat is pushed as far back as it will go.  This presumably provides maximum comfort for the driver and flexibility for changing drivers.  However, there is no legroom for an ordinary adult to sit comfortably in the back.  I'm under 5'3" and my knees hit the seat in front.  And, this is the only city where the space on the floor is too narrow to accomodate my small rolling briefcase.  

This is a stellar example of the topsy-turvy Wonderland of today's customer service.  Here the comfort of the service worker takes precedence over the comfort of the customer.  And, with most people still giving the same tips, what's to convince them to change?