Average Time To Resolve Problems is Three Times Higher Than Customers Want (zdnet.com) 110
Businesses seem to be setting the bar for "good" customer service too low, according to a recent study, which could have significant business impact as the customer experience becomes even more vital as customers decide to buy. From a report: Boston, Mass.- based identity and access company LogMeIn recently released a study to analyze the business impact and consumer attitudes of today's customers and their journey to a sale. It surveyed over 5,000 respondents consisting of business leaders and consumers around the globe. Its 2018 AI Customer Experience study shows that over one-third of consumers were not impressed with their customer journey. Over four out of five (83 percent) of consumers citied an average or poor experience, saying that they had at least one issue while interacting with a brand. Conversely, 80 percent of businesses believe their customers would give them a favorable review -- even whilst admitting that less than half of customer queries are resolved during the first interaction. Two-thirds (68 percent) of business respondents agree that their agents struggle with the volume of customer enquiries, and 61 percent of consumers feel that it takes too long for an enquiry to be resolved.
Wait... (Score:3)
3 x 0 = 0.
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I think it's 3 x yesterday = 3 days ago.
Re:Wait... (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it's 3 x yesterday = 3 days ago.
Indeed. Not only do people want their problems fixed immediately, they don't want to have the problems in the first place.
Also if 4 of 5 people have problems with "at least one brand", and companies think 80% of their customers are satisfied, these two facts are not mathematically inconsistent. They can both be true.
Here''s a great way to fix customer problems: Require the engineers who designed the product to spend one day a week doing 2nd tier support. It is amazing how much this motivates them to improve the product.
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Honestly most of the time I get the feeling it's not the engineer's at fault for most issues (although some clever "solutions..." uggh but I digress.) most of the time there is a list of requirements and in that list is "Do A-Z with cost under what A-Z could reliably be done with, also do it all in a time scale that is either impossible or just unrealistic"
I worked for Dell doing L2 tech support and yeah it was good times... (Vista was launching during that period of time and Vista ready was a hilarious jok
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there is a list of requirements and in that list is "Do A-Z with cost under what A-Z could reliably be done with, also do it all in a time scale that is either impossible or just unrealistic"
So he was almost right.... Require each of the project managers and supervisors who oversee the engineering, development, and maintenance, especially the budget, timelines, and requirements spec related to each product to spend one day a week manning the phones and doing 2nd tier support for the latest supported
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Yeah I imagine this is pretty much the case, once you get out of the trenches so to speak it's just a numbers game and at that point reality just sort of flies out the window. I remember in training (was very thorough and great training) all the great things we could do to help customers and "Be the reason" all that flies out the window once your on the floor in production. After you hit the floor it's literally about keeping the customer on the phone as long as possible (sub contractor phone tech support s
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The solution is not to contract out service and support calls but put sales and production staff on rotation in sales and support to create depth of understanding between staff and customers but disposable staff == disposable companies == disposable customers, management by psychopathy.
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Shock horror, capitalism sucks (Score:2, Insightful)
Could it be that rampant, unchecked free market capitalism means that companies are employing less people to do the same amount or more work and customers are noticing?
Hey, but don't worry, this is definitely the most efficient system and nobody could possibly to better, probably. And all that money will eventually trickle down to the rest of us, right? I mean, it's not like these businesses are paying people stagnant or lower wages and the rich are walking away with ever bigger slices of the pie, right?
Rig
How to succeed at business-get people to work free (Score:3)
Could it be that rampant, unchecked free market capitalism means that companies are employing less people to do the same amount or more work and customers are noticing?
I'd say that the unchecked free market capitalism means that companies are employing zero people to do the same amount of work: when I try to get support from a major company, it is pretty much impossible to get to an actual human being. Often the best I can do is to get shuffled off to a customer "support forum", where people post their problems, and other customers, working for free, post their workarounds to solve the issues.
What a great business strategy! Get your customers-- the people who pay you!--
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I'd say that the unchecked free market capitalism means that companies are employing zero people to do the same amount of work: when I try to get support from a major company, it is pretty much impossible to get to an actual human being
This is indeed the shitty new model, but I've only seen it from the likes of Google: big mass-market companies that have never even acknowledged that customer service is something they should be doing.
Even my cell carrier and my car dealership have real human customer support, frustrating as it might be to reach them. Heck, banks used to be the bottom of the barrel, but they've really upped their game these days (excepting Wells Fargo, which united their customer service and fraud creation departments), an
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but I've only seen it from the likes of Google: big mass-market companies that have never even acknowledged that customer service is something they should be doing.
My company runs ad campaigns on Google, and their customer support is excellent. If you, as an end user, think it is bad, then you are confused, because you are not their customer, you are just a user.
There is no plausible way that Google can offer personal support for everyone that uses their search engine, maps, office suite, or other free services, and it is not reasonable to expect them to do so.
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It's always reasonable to expect that a business that offers a service should offer support for that service. Google's attitude is one more reason not use their services (not to be their product). If only there were a credible alternative to YouTube.
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It's always reasonable to expect that a business that offers a service should offer support for that service.
It is never reasonable to expect personalized handholding while paying nothing.
Google provides FREE services. They support these services with tutorials, blogs, and FAQs. To expect more than that is ridiculous.
If only there were a credible alternative to YouTube.
Why don't you start one? The difference will be no ads and a fully staffed 24/7 1-800 number to call if you don't like the video. Should be easy, right?
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You should try raising your expectations. You might get more out of life.
YouTube, though, goes beyond "no customer service for viewers" and delivers "no customer service for content creators". Way to raise the bar there, Google.
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It is never reasonable to expect personalized handholding while paying nothing.
Google provides FREE services. They support these services with tutorials, blogs, and FAQs. To expect more than that is ridiculous.
Google charges us by using our data and selling it, we're their product, so they should make sure that their product can provide them with more data to make more money!
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lgw complained:
but I've only seen it from the likes of Google: big mass-market companies that have never even acknowledged that customer service is something they should be doing.
Prompting ShanghaiBill to respond:
My company runs ad campaigns on Google, and their customer support is excellent. If you, as an end user, think it is bad, then you are confused, because you are not their customer, you are just a user.
There is no plausible way that Google can offer personal support for everyone that uses their search engine, maps, office suite, or other free services, and it is not reasonable to expect them to do so.
It's hard to argue with that logic - except I'm a Project Fi customer, who pays Google for my service. And I can't say I'm satisfied with their customer support at all.
I recently bricked my Nexus 6. While I wrestled with trying to raise it from the dead, I simply wanted to forward calls made to my number to my wife's phone.
Because Project Fi is the carrier for both phones, Google's support people - who are all Indian, and thus contractors to whom Google has
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Because 'smash capitalism' is the answer to all questions.
Says more about you than anything else, nothing good. You are delusional, historically _ignorant_ and no doubt part of a commie circle jerk at your middle school.
You deserve Baria style 'customer service'...we're sorry you are unhappy with the accomodations at the gulag...please accept a 7.62 bullet.
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No, but regulate capitalism does cure a lot of ills. So much so that it was strongly recommended by Smith.
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Capitalism is regulated by definition. The only people that say otherwise are reds posting straw men.
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So you're saying that the Tea Party are a bunch of pinkos?
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Reducing unneeded regulation is not the same as _no_ regulation.
You should know that, just repeating derp and playing stupid.
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A capitalist can only be as good as its consumers are.
The whole rationale which "proves" that free markets are optimal is based on the assumption that consumers make perfectly rational decisions with perfect information. In that world a consumer would never take an auto loan without comparison shopping, just to drive the car off the lot *today*. If he bought a shoddily built television he'd be making a conscious choice to prioritize short term cash flow over long term expense. And if he signed over his
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Never read the classical economists, I take it.
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I agree, but I was talking about the arguments that free markets yield optimal results, which is the theoretical basis for favoring markets. History does not support the idea that markets always converge on optimal solutions to things like pricing and supply, only that they work better on a practical basis than central planning based schemes that have been tried thus far.
However if consumers are sufficiently lazy, and if consumer protection laws are sufficiently weak, there's no real lower limit to how poo
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Like the textbook model of supply and demand? Which assumes that;
All of which is demonstrably stupid and doesn't match the real economy.
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"Optimal" means the best possible - *not* the best we've tried. The optimal form of capitalism has never been tried, is generally opposed by capitalists, and may not be possible.
Meanwhile, historically we've really only tried four basic forms of economies - capitalism, state-owned capitalism (often mis-labeled communism, which it bears only the most superficial resemblance to), commune-scale communism, and gift economies. The last two of which were probably the basis of human exchange for most of our exis
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Capitalism gave you everything you have in life, including the medium required to bitch about it.
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Capitalism gave you everything you have in life, including the medium required to bitch about it.
Capitalism didn't create vocal cords and air.
I will acknowledge that capitalism gave us mass-produced pens, paper, and printing presses.
Capitalism didn't give us the Internet, that was the US military.
Re:Shock horror, capitalism sucks (Score:4, Interesting)
Could it be that rampant, unchecked free market capitalism means that companies are employing less people to do the same amount or more work and customers are noticing?
Capitalism seeks profits. which requires repeat business. Don't confuse that with short-sighted greed. Without bailouts, short-sighted greed is a self-solving problem. You see this all the time with small businesses in the modern world of online reputation, where word gets around quickly if you cut too many corners. It's very much a world of "be as cheap as you can without the customer noticing" these days, for small businesses, as you can no longer get away with "as long as the customer doesn't notice until after I get their money".
Anyhow, it's just freaking stupid to under-staff a call center: increasing queue times pisses off customers and doesn't make it cheaper as all the calls still need to be handled. The only way you save money is if customers abandon the queue, which are usually lost customers.
You want the "depth" of the queue to be one call per rep. That gives you all the cost savings (no idle reps), and an expected wait time equal to the average time it takes to handle a call, which most people are OK with.
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If you look at the companies with the worst customer service, they tend to be monopolies, have captured regulators that allow them to abuse their customers and make it difficult to change providers. Both are inevitable outcomes of capitalism, so the original poster's laying the blame there for poor customer service is correct.
Yes, that's the telecom industry and it sucks. There are some other examples like airlines (lots of bailouts there). But don't pretend that's the norm. Especially anywhere you're dealing with small businesses, there's obviously no monopoly or regulatory capture. Even with large corporations, you can come up with some sectors like telecom where corporation and government have become too tightly coupled, but they are exceptions and most business still have to compete for customers.
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In the same free market, I can choose not to do business with companies that piss me off. And have.
I have fewer choices with government run enterprise. The example conservatives keep dragging into the discussion is the DMV, which is an easy target, but it applies to any enterprise where you don't have a choice.
Lilly Tomlin said it best, years ago. "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company." Replace that with Social Security, most utilities, Comcast, any business where choice is artific
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or Google.
or Google, yes. You can use a different search engine (and I do) but there ain't a lot of choices in phones. I have a very old Galaxy that I've been thinking of replacing, but Apple support royally pissed me off yesterday, so it's not likely to be replaced with anything running IOS. Maybe I'll look at Blackberry again.
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The reality of free market capitalism isn't that it makes everything rainbows and puppy dogs, it's that it gives consumers what they are willing to pay to pay for. Every day customers vote with their wallets and if they continue to give their business to companies with what they regard as poor customer service, whose fault is that really? They might value customer service, but what they value more is
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and customers are noticing?
"Customers noticing" is only relevant if it means that significant percentages of them are changing their buying habits.
If customers say "Wal-Mart sucks" and then continue to shop at Wal-Mart then the fact that the customers "noticed" is irrelevant.
It's no different than customers complaining about airline service, but then exclusively purchasing air travel based on the lowest fare - Unless customers are willing to vote with their wallets, nothing will change.
That's because (Score:3)
Customer Service Representatives are 3x higher than the customers
Unrealistic Customer expectation. (Score:2)
If you have to fix a problem, you need to make sure it will not negatively affect any other customer as well.
Also a lot of companies outsource to other companies, because they think they will have better service then in-house, However their inhouse is probably better staffed and skilled then the company is.
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Some of this is consumer driven -- people have little patience, and even less of it for expensive items they find confusing but necessary to own.
But I wonder how much of their unrealistic expectation is driven by unrealistic burdens placed on them? Eg, my widget is broken and I need my widget (which of course I am required to provide to do my job) to work. When my widget is broken, I can't work and my boss and my customers get pissed I am not helping them.
I think people generally are super-stressed anymor
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So you think it's an unreasonable expectation that a support person actually has the ability to look in to a problem and tell me truthfully what has gone wrong? And that it's unreasonable to expect that they at least have some way to talk to someone with the knowledge and authority to make a decision?
My finding with the local ISP is that the CS reps don't even have the ability to see if there are outstanding trouble tickets for the network side in my area. They also don't have the training or common sense n
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I am well aware of that. I also know the guy's name isn't actually "Bob". That just means that the ISP has failed to meet a reasonable expectation.
Sometimes the problem is the customer (Score:1)
We are experiencing higher than normal call volume (Score:5, Interesting)
Last time I was experiencing a problem I called 7 days in a row, with each new person assuring me they would be the one to fix the issue. Finally on the 7th day the last person told me to not call back as it wouldn't help resolve the issue. So I haven't called back. Instead I took it upon myself to resolve the issue and found an alternative solution that didn't involve their services anymore. Now that I have an alternative, they are calling me to ask if I'm still experiencing problem. The last call they made to me was awesome, "are you still experiencing problems", nope I canceled your service about a week ago, "[click]".
Customer service trumps results (Score:2)
As someone for whom that doesn't work (I'm more than a bit autistic) it drives me nuts that it works. But it absolutely does.
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Hey, it's better than e.g. cell carriers, where you get a 1-hour hold time and they still can't fix the problem. Fixing the hold time is something that customer service departments cant own, and IMO is has gotten better since 2000.
Actually fixing the issue goes deeper - CS can only resolve those problems they've been given the power/training to fix. But I'd far prefer a short hold time to talk to a human who can't help me over a long hold time for the same!
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*departments can own
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(A) $8 disposables never meant to be useful, and hold time
(B) $8 disposables never meant to be useful, and longer hold time
I don't know why there's a distinction, for your purposes. Why call, pursuing solutions, to a desk where they'll never bother putting solutions?
Sorry, but why did you buy an "$8 disposable never meant to be useful" in the first place, and why would you expect support for such a thing?
automated voice systems (Score:2)
My issue is automated voice systems. I spend 30 minutes just getting to a human. If they only support voice they are even worse. Currently I just press 0 over and over while saying 'fuck shit fuck' until something sends me to a agent.
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Called, put in my phone number, confirmed details, sent to voice prompt roulette. Then clearly said "Upgrade DSL"; transferring to account inquiry. After being asked if I wanted to know what my last bill was, I said "no" and back into voice roulette. This time I said "DSL"; prompt couldn't understand; repeated "DSL"; transferring call. The person answering the call
I don't necessarily mind a wait time... (Score:2)
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The only thing I want is for them to stop lying and telling me "we are experiencing unusually high call volumes", and instead tell me "we have analyzed our call volumes and refuse to hire any more operators as we have targeted your normal wait time to be 12 minutes".
If they are having unusually high call volumes it means they screwed something up. But nobody *always* has unusually high call volumes.
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It's amazing how many lies they tell before you even get to say the first word. By the time a human comes on the line, you have been told how excellent their product or service is (so why did I need to call support?), how important my call is (so why don'y you answer it?), the someone will answer shortly (by what definition?), that the call volume is unusually high (has it ever NOT been "unusually" high?). Then the person who finally does answer lies about their name! No, I do not believe that the person wi
It's not the destination... (Score:4, Interesting)
Boston, Mass.- based identity and access company LogMeIn recently released a study to analyze the business impact and consumer attitudes of today's customers and their journey to a sale.
Journey to a sale?
Really?
Whats next, a caravan to a refund?
How about a junket to a recall?
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Journey to a sale?
Really?
Must be epic.
So? When have customers ever been rational? (Score:2)
Seriously, what a dumb study, comparing what people want to what they get, devoid of logic.
Women are 900% less interested in me than they should be. I'm angry!
Customer journey ? My ass (Score:4)
"Customer journey" is one of those horrible words thought out by marketing drones in expensive suits. When I'm a customer, I don't go on a fucking journey (if I want to journey, I'll take my luggage and go travel); companies have customer treatment, which can be good or poor, and that's it, fucking period.
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When I hear the phrase "customer journy", I also hear "The ballad of Lemiwinks" [youtube.com].
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Thank you for sharing your feedback. May we include your Story in our Epic?
ai - i found this article confusing. (Score:2)
sorry this is a meta-comment, but I found it strange.
The title talks about the time to resolve customer service problems.
The article talks about an "AI customer experience study."
I'm inferring that the story is about how people feel about talking to chatbots. But when the article talks about chatbots, it doesn't talk about time.
Maybe the problem with the chatbots is that they do not provide valuable information, and just give customers the runaround. Is that really a time problem?
funny this should appear today (Score:2)
This article is serendipitous. Just so happens that yesterday I talked to "Amadou" at Apple Support to try to get our ABM account activated. We'd gone through the enrollment process, which took 3 days, got the "enrollment complete" message, and then discovered we couldn't log into the portal with our Apple ID credentials. (Literally, "Your Apple ID is not allowed to sign in to this application."). "Amadou" said we'd have to create a new Apple ID and go through the process again. I said we went through t
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I changed cell phone carriers recently because of bad customer service. I bought (paid cash) for a new phones for my family. They activated it at the apple store (unlocked phone). I get my cell phone bill from Verizon and I see activation fees. That is a fee for me buying a new working phones and Verizon doing nothing. I call support and I'm told this is a industry standard practice. I protest that in with past carriers I was only charged a fee for signing up. I was never charged for switching phones. Again
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Exactly. I am the only person on the planet who doesn't read a tiny document in full while a sales rep stands over with other customers waiting. I also don't have a law background, so I really should bring a lawyer with me to sign up for new services. This explains why everyone is in pairs at the Verizon store I guess.
Instead of a list of buried fees that are predatory and have no value to me the customer (as if activating a phone is a big expense for Verizon), what if I was presented with a nice list of fe
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I had a similar experience with Verizon, and like you transferred us to T-mobile. We had originally gone to Verizon from AT&T because Verizon didn't suck quite as badly. Now we're at t-mobile for the same reason.
That said, if you *buy* a phone at t-mobile (you went to them, as did I, with pre-existing phones) they will probably offer you "free" stuff along with your phone, like a tablet or a waterproof bluetooth speaker. If your experience is similar to mine, the salesperson will say to your face tha
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That is exactly why I moved to buying my phones directly from Apple, Samsung, and Google. I got bit by a similar thing at AT&T when we got our first 'smart' phones years ago. I now only buy phones directly from manufactures and only buy unlocked devices. But if they want to charge me for moving a sim card from one phone to another, well I'd rather not have a phone at all.
Re:funny this should appear today (Score:4, Insightful)
Nobody has the time to read a 20 page wall of text or the money to hire a lawyer to tell them what it actually says. Those walls of text are another example of poor customer interaction and when they contain anything even vaguely surprising buried in paragraph 4 on page 10 in fine print, border on fraud.
So many root causes here! (Score:3)
1. Companies need to take some more care to release products that work as advertised! If you want to reduce the number of support calls, make sure the product you're selling doesn't NEED that much support for malfunctions or failure to perform as stated on the box or in marketing materials.
2. Provide better documentation. (There was a Slashdot discussion about this topic just a day or two ago, with someone asking why nothing seems to come with a decent printer manual anymore.) If customers can't figure a product out that they just bought, they're going to call in to ask about it.
3. Stop hiring the cheapest warm bodies you can get to answer your phones or do online chat support! I just had a terrible experience using Amazon's online chat support last week. Had a simple request .... Just wanted to find out if I could exchange a broken camera that came as part of a videoconferencing solution, rather than having to tear the whole installation back out and box it ALL up for a return. The first lady I chatted with SLOWLY asked me bunch of really basic questions, such as confirming the product I was asking about was a specific one.... After all that, she tells me she "has to forward me to a specialist who can handle my concern" and I start chatting with a second individual, who asks the SAME annoying questions over again. I think it took a good 45 minutes to finally get the answer that they couldn't help me at all unless I shipped the whole thing back. (I could have just done that process online in 30 seconds.) When I asked if we could just do an even exchange -- that required another 10 minutes for them to tell me they couldn't because of some kind of system problem on their end.
4. If you call in and it says your wait time will be excessive? Offer to let the person hang up and receive a call back when someone is available. T-Mobile does this on their support line, and I believe Tesla Motors does it too. It should become the industry standard. Let people get back to whatever else they're doing rather than tying up their phone listening to hold music and waiting.
Customers want their problems solved immediately. (Score:2)
So three times nothing is...nothing?
Tech support or pre-sale customer service? (Score:3)
This just in, people also think the average... (Score:1)
etc.
Ring is the worst... (Score:2)