To the editor:
I appreciated your recent article on customer care-you made several relevant points and I look forward to the day when carriers begin to heed your well-worded advice. If I may, I would like to add a few observations of my own:
All potential business mistakes lead to customer service and customer care issues. The customer care attendant is only the tail end of the process, but not the heart of the problem.
Carriers may have scrimped on a few dollars on their networks. They may have made a small mistake in their advertisements or manuals for handsets. They may have done a less than excellent job training sales staff. All of these “small” problems will appear as extra costs in customer care.
To solve the customer care problem and abate the flood of customer care calls, carriers need to think quality throughout the whole process of providing wireless service.
Research from Technology Trends indicates that customers who rate themselves “very satisfied” compared to “satisfied” are six times more likely to do two things:
1) buy from you again, and
2) tell five other people to buy your product.
I think that tells us exactly where carriers need to be in terms of customer care; they need to be in the business of making apostles of every customer.
If wireless providers don’t have quality throughout their processes, from marketing and sales to tower placement to billing, and the industry buzz is that they are getting volumes of customer care calls, that indicates customers probably are not in that “very satisfied customer” category. And, unfortunately, if they’re not in that category, they are probably telling their friends about their bad experiences.
Carriers need to implement a “zero-defect” policy in their complete chain of customer contact. That means providing very dense radio-frequency (strong signal) where it’s needed. That means getting collateral materials to bear correct phone numbers, operating hours and addresses. That means that manuals should be tested and proven error-free. That means carefully training all sales staff. That means making sure bills are easy to understand. Today, all of these things are not error-free and providers are paying the price in customer care.
Carriers must provide quality through everything they do so that their customers have a very positive impression of the wireless industry.
Quality throughout the process will help customer care. Any lack of quality, no matter what our excuse is, will hurt customer care and raise operating costs.
Hunt Eggleston
Technology Trends Inc.
Poway, Calif.
