There is customer service - and there is service for the customer, as some people say.
Ok, but what about the following experience. Does that fall into the category “service for the customer”?
I booked a flight online. When finished, I was pleased to immediately receive the booking confirmation per email. I went rapidly through and noticed something went wrong. Something not important for the flight itself, something more of an administrative issue relevant to taxes. Something that if not done well, may end up next year in a long mail exchange. The billing address was not complete. Probably the software on the web had cut long entries in the form. Annoying but it is something that can be solved rapidly. So I wanted to reply to the incoming mail and ask the airline to replace the billing address with the one the tax authority would accept.
Click on reply, write something like, “with regard to attached booking Nr xyz, please replace the billing address with the next address. Thank you. Why my best regards”. At most 2 minutes work. It ended up with more than 20 minutes of stress, tension, call waiting and real Euro costs.
Why? Because first of all the mail I received was a no-reply mail. It did not contain any contact information, no link to customer service, no phone number. But plenty of links to renting cars, hotel booking and all the stuff you can imagine finding at the end of an airline mail. Only the attachment to the mail contained a 14 cent per minute phone number to call. I looked again … no way to contact the airline company per mail.
So I called the 14 cent a minute phone number, landed in a waiting queue and after 15 minutes got an agent who needed some context information like the booking number and my name. Just say “Dugast”, a French name to a German person on the phone and you are good for 20 seconds of spelling. And eventually we got to the reason of my call, to correct the billing address. But he did not want to go for that, so we went for a completely new billing address, starting from scratch with plenty of “Alpha Tango, yes I got it .. sorry … would you mind repeating please …”.
A 20 minute phone call in total with 15 minutes in the waiting line. Their buggy software cost me 2,80 €! Their buggy software cost me 20 minutes of my time. Their buggy software cost me unneeded negative stress!
And … at the end, no apologies! I can go for no apologies from an automatic system. But from an agent who even noted the form filling system on the web was doing too much in cutting long entries, I would expect some basic natural human behavior. Why do I need personal assistance if it is no more human than speaking with a machine? And on top if the conversation with the agent is much more complex than using automatic written assistance.
A few days later, I went on the web site to look for online check-in. This is where I noted that this airline company does in fact allow for written communication. Yes they do. With a web form. As always hidden behind some small button. But I was surprised. How could I have overlooked this button when I wanted to change the billing address?
The answer is very simple: I was on the email channel. I was reading an email when I saw the problem. I was not on the web. I naturally wanted to reply to the mail … or to look within the mail for some communication means. How can I imagine more communication capabilities on the web (which is per definition not communicative) as within a communication channel like email? So they write me an email, they communicate with me, but only one way … They do not allow me to use the channel they opened themselves. “Please do not come back to us, we do not want to know what problems or questions you may have.” This is the message they are sending implicitly.
How could they have done better? From a customer´s point of view, it is very simple: They could have kept alive the communication channel they opened themselves. That is: to allow for a mail answer when they are sending mails.
If the customer service is afraid of opening a communication channel with no constraints, than the next best solution would have been to display in the mail a link to the web form. As simple as that. Nothing more. The communication is established and kept with no channel disruption. That´s the way you provide service for the customer – instead of customer service.
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