On client service

As Tom Peters says in his Professional Service Firm 50 book:

Client service is the name of the game. And that’s all, folks. The reality: You exist to serve clients. They pay your bills. If you don’t perform, they can – and will – take their custom elsewhere.

My Experience With Verizon

Wouldn’t it be nice if all companies operated that way? Take, for instance, Verizon. Today, they happened to lose DSL service for the city of Philadelphia and part of the state of Delaware. Now, I can understand a brief outage. Hey – it happens (though a carrier of their size should have a back up system in place…).

But what’s particularly irritating is when the service goes down during prime business time – all morning until 2PM today. Learning my DSL wasn’t working at the start of business, I gave their call center a ring.

Now, Verizon doesn’t actually want you to speak with a live representative (it’s cheaper that way), so they have voice recognition software that asks you questions. Sometimes it understands you, other times you must repeat what you said several times before it moves on to the next question. Talk about frustrating!

After going through a half dozen questions and checking my DSL connection, it then tells me they’re experiencing problems in my area and they expect the service to be back up around 12:30PM. Great! At least they’re keeping me in the loop – right? But why couldn’t they put that message at the start of the message when they learned from my area code that I may be in their outage area?

By 1:30PM, service still wasn’t restored. Now I’m getting worried because I have a 5PM deadline and can’t even check my email for updates. I pick up the phone and go through the voice automated process again until I get the recorded DSL message. This time, there’s no estimated time for when they expect service to be restored. I could hold for the next available operator – wait time is less than 30 minutes!

What? Like I’m really going to sit on hold for 30 minutes waiting for someone to tell me they know there’s an outage and they don’t know when it will be fixed.

Ironic, I suppose since Seth Godin just mentioned a few of Verizon problems yesterday in his blog.

Learning From Verizon’s Mistakes

So, here are a few customer service lessons we can learn from Verizon:

1. If you’re experiencing problems, let your clients know asap when you’ll have the problem fixed.
2. Stick to that deadline!
3. Give out pertinent information quickly and easily. (ie don’t waste my time with a long diagnostic check if the problem is that your service is out in my area.)
4. Have live people available for questions (Voice automated software and 30 minute wait times make customers believe you don’t want to help them.)

Update: It seems the Verizon outage was caused “when a software upgrade went awry.” And that’s why testing is important! ( link )

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