Customer Service - From Promise to Performance

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.  

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....

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!

It all began the first time I walked into a store and someone referred to me as a "guest." 

"A guest?" I asked.  "I'm not a guest.  I'm a customer." 

Guests are people who must defer to their hosts.  When you really are a guest, you don't tell your host that you didn't like dinner, would prefer a different pillow, or are going to stay longer. 

These days, I'm feeling a bit like Alice in Wonderland, with all the norms of customer service turned topsy-turvy. 

So, I've decided to devote this section to describing customer service failures and oddities .