Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Excerpts from Ch. 5 of "The Best Service is No Service"

"The Best Service is No Service: How to Liberate Your Customers from Customer Service, Keep Them Happy, and Control Costs"

By  Bill Price and David Jaffe

Chapter 5

GOOD CASES

The companies that are good at making it easy to contact them also make this skill look easy to do; when you observe these businesses, it seems so obvious that they clearly “get it.” Nevertheless, they represent the minority of the companies that we see today. We will touch on USAA Insurance, Apple, i-select, Virgin, Bank of America, and Amazon.

PICK A NUMBER, ANY NUMBER, AT USAA

One of the most successful U.S.-based insurance providers is USAA, originally serving current and former U.S. military officers but now open to senior enlisted ranks as well. USAA’s biggest reason for losing customers is death, not competition or poor service, and USAA “members” (as they are called, and in full disclosure, Bill Price has been a USAA member since 1972) have enabled the company to win coveted quality awards year after year. One of USAA’s hallmarks is making it easy to contact the company. Figure 5.1 is a screen shot of a small portion its Contact Us Web page. In addition to sharing its contact information broadly, USAA connects its own contact centers with third parties that provide specialized services such as credit cards or business insurance, making it seem to the USAA member that he is still working with one company when in fact he might be touching different enterprises.

FIGURE 5.1: USAA CONTACT US WEB PAGE
APPLE: GENIUS, PURE GENIUS

Not only has Apple revolutionized product design with easy-to-use computers, iPod MP3 players, iPhones, and other products, but the company has also led the way in making itself really easy to contact. The Apple Stores mushrooming across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Italy, Australia, and Japan fulfill the promise on the Apple Web site: “Innovative, approachable, and designed like no place else. The Apple Store is the best place to learn everything there is to know about the Mac or iPod. Wondering what products are best for you? Let our Mac Specialists answer all your questions. Need a hand setting up your Mac or want to get the most out of your iPod? Visit the Genius Bar for one-on-one support and advice. Free workshops—for beginners and pros—are always available. Welcome to the Apple Store.” Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, has managed this rollout brilliantly where other companies have failed, partly because he imagined a completely different customer experience: welcoming customers. “He set out to create the conditions most likely to convert museum visitors into actual customers, and then to make those customers feel that they were being pampered long after the sale was consummated.”1

WHERE TO CALL ON EACH I-SELECT PAGE

i-select is a rapidly growing health insurance broker in Australia. Its whole business model is built around the proposition that health insurance is a highly complex product and that customers and prospects find it very hard to compare the features and benefits of different companies. By making their products complex and hard to compare, the insurance companies themselves opened the opportunity for a broker like i-select. The company also recognized that customers and prospects were researching and comparing products online and that visiting a half dozen Web sites was too time consuming. The company knows that making it easy for the customer means that its customers need to be able to talk to someone as well, so every page of the i-select Web site has the number to call in very large letters. Rather than hiding the number or making the customer hunt for it, i-select actively seeks the calls.

By comparison, many of the health funds whose products i-select sells are much more restrictive about publishing contact details on their Web sites; their mind-set seems to be, “Well, you’re using our self-service now, so we don’t want to tempt you with those expensive staffed channels, even for sales.” This “protective” behavior opens the door to i-select and others like it to intermediate between the customer and the manufacturers of the products (health insurance, mortgages, and so on). Ironically, by being concerned about the cost of contact, the companies who manufacture the products give away much more money in sales commissions to a company like i-select that makes itself really easy to contact.

BANK OF AMERICA: WHERE DID YOU GO?

Sometimes companies surprise us when they take the extra effort to make it easy to contact them. Here’s a short summary of one such experience with Bank of America (this story came to us by e-mail): “This morning, I was put on hold while being transferred to another agent, and I realized I didn’t have time to wait, so I hung up. A minute later, the original agent called me back and apologized that the call had been dropped, and tried to get me back in the queue. Not all companies would want to implement that, but for a bank, it makes great sense, and emphasizes the ‘personal, caring’ stuff they try to project.”

AMAZON CHANNELS OPEN FOR BUSINESS

Amazon is a case in point of not wanting to restrict contact. Customers certainly have many self-help choices and can fire off e-mail inquiries if they need anything. Amazon piloted and has expanded a “click for callback” feature that exploits the latest Web-based phone technologies to support the customer. The Amazon agent who then calls the customer knows the entire history of the customer’s visits to the Web site and is already able to figure out why the customer needs help, which (1) improves the connection between customer and Amazon and (2) shortens the handle time.

Even Amazon has suffered challenges to ensuring that it is easy to contact. For a period of time, the company emphasized its vaunted self-service, FAQs, and rapid, complete responses via e-mail messages, and made the toll-free number harder to find. The number never changed, and it was easily found on Google and other search engines, but Amazon’s systems frustrated some of its customers with contradictory order status where a quick phone call would have been very helpful. In the run-up to a recent holiday season, Amazon e-mailed U.K. customers (several times) to remind them that December 18 would be the cutoff date for orders to ensure that they would arrive before Christmas. However, Web site messages were somewhat mixed: pages for some items stated that the product would normally be shipped within twenty-fours hours, but a message appeared at the top of the screen stating that all orders could not be guaranteed for delivery before Christmas. Following the site’s e-mail process only compounded the confusion: there were automated replies stating, “If you’ve explored the above links and still need to get in touch with us, you will find all our contact details in the online help guide.” Fortunately, Amazon listened to its customers, synchronized the systems’ messaging, and restored easier access to the phone channel.

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