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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