I recently had an opportunity to experience an industry-who-shall-not-be-named’s version of “Customer Care.”   Followed thereafter by another industry’s version of “Customer Care.”   Both companies incidentally have been in the news recently.  Before anyone starts thinking this is a statement on health care reform or the airline industry, it is not.  This discussion is about how the drive for efficiency and streamlining can sabotage any company, big or small – regardless of industry.  For discussion purposes, allow me to share some background.

My experience began simply enough – my physician and insurance company had decided to part ways, and I received a letter informing me of their impending divorce and instructions on how to successfully and smoothly transition (hah!  I should have known something was up).  No less than 8 phone calls later spanning 12 hours (during which I established a friendly first-name basis with supervisors who quickly learned of my ability to speak fluently in truckdriver-ese), my issue remains unresolved.  Every step of the way I’ve had to explain the history over again, refer to past recorded conversations, re-submit paperwork, and experienced far too many transfers to other departments that “take care of that and can help” (the important point here being by "help" they were referring to helping increase my aforementioned foreign language skills).  Each time I have reminded the call centers that I had gotten 3 letters (from them!) which both supported and contradicted previous conversations and letters, and had to clarify that I was not in fact a crazy person, while assuring the call center representative “YES I AM SURE I live in New Jersey and NO I do not see my doctor in Massachusetts.”  Even my specialist and primary care physicians’ offices joined in the discussion.  Having more experience than me as a newbie in this healthcare-company-who-shall-not-be-named version of appeals process, both offices gave me sage advice (“Good luck.”)

Why do I bring this up?  Because I am passionate about customer service.  And there are so many opportunities to enhance customer experiences while improving your bottom line.  Customer Care (Call Center) models were developed years ago to take components of customer service and make them repeatable and scalable, while delivering consistent levels of service, which could then be improved upon.  Had I been working with a Customer Care model that had a solid Customer Relationship Management system that all employees had access to and were well trained in, as well as standardized processes for delivering customer service, the experience would have been quite different.  Call Centers [that are] implemented well, and their approach to segmenting components of customer service can provide tremendous benefit to the company and the customer.  The challenge becomes when companies look only at the short term returns and ignore the care and feeding of their Customer Care Operations which in turn can enhance and improve the longer term customer relationship (and corresponding loyalty, referrals and cross and up sell opportunities). 

How are you improving your company’s customer experience?  Have you experienced great customer service recently?  Let us know your thoughts!