We moved last year, a process that can best be described as wading through treacle. I lost track of the amount of time I spent listening to scratchy blasts of Vivaldi attempting to correct basic errors from service providers. Each time I was reassured my call was important, that they were experiencing unusually high demand, and that the call would be recorded for training and monitoring purposes.
It seems my experience of dealing with customer facing organisations is not uncommon. Miranda Green in an excellent FT Weekend piece entitled “Your call is important to us… please hold” quotes from a New Britain Project Report which notes the average Briton spends between 28-41 minutes a week battling inefficient customer service systems.
She says, “The 1.5bn hours that Britons spend each year dealing with personal admin leave many close to cracking up“.
The digital revolution and remote working was supposed to improve productivity. Has it or are customers now entangled in a web of endless options with faceless systems? Let’s examine.
I’m going to share a couple of unrelated stories with one common theme – each of the organisations invested heavily in client facing technology to improve service.
The Conveyancing Story: “I will send an email to see if we’ve received an email”
As part of the move I rearranged financing on a previous home. Our finance broker set everything in place and an offer was forthcoming from a lender (BMS) I’d previously used. This time they instructed a different conveyancing company (let’s call them Optimus Prime-OP).
All went well at first. An online tracking system was set up in our name; it allowed us to upload relevant documents and see how our financing was progressing.
The tracker system was updated with details of all communication. Great, we thought! There was no chain involved so they were predicting a quick completion. The mortgage offer was sent. And then….
I uploaded proof of ID and address on March 4th. They spotted an error (not of my making). Somehow, due to an input error during the application process I’d become 10 years younger. OP required authority from BMS to accept my passport Date of Birth as being correct.
On March 7th the lender emailed OP to give them that authority.
On 10th I rang OP for an update having checked the tracking system which was unchanged. I’m told “we haven’t heard from BMS” which surprised me. I asked the broker to double check. He did and confirmed the email address BMS sent it to was indeed an OP email address.
When I relayed that message to my case handler at OP the following day I am told, “That’s an admin email address which I don’t have access to.” I was further told “I will have to email them the admin team to gain access to it.”
By now it’s March 24th and my patience has worn thin so I escalate the request to a very helpful team member:
Good morning Mr Corney, thank you for your phone call. I can confirm that the email from BMS regarding your date of birth is not on the file, I can confirm that I have emailed the admin team in order to re-check the inbox…
Yet another round of Broker / Lender / Conveyancer discusssions ensue and I am promised a call by a Senior Legal Officer to discuss. No date or time is given.
As I was unavailable when they called (on March 25th) I get this message:
I have recently attempted to contact you to discuss the expression of dissatisfaction that has been raised on your file, however it appears you were unavailable. As an update on your file the issues surrounding your ID check have been resolved and your file is now at the final stages where we will perform a final review of the file to ensure that we have everything required to supply you with a completion date and you should be hearing from us within the next couple of days to discuss the possibility of completion for your file.
Completion duly took place before the Stamp Duty increase came into play on April 1st.
Rather than revisit my issues, here’s what a dissatisfied customer just posted on TrustPilot:
AVOID! AVOID! AVOID! A simple remortgage has taken 5 months! We ended up having to pay variable rates for 3 months. There is no sense of urgency unless you raise a complaint. There’s no one to speak to or email about progress. Everything is done via a very inefficient portal. I can’t believe — recommended them!
The Soccer Story: “Paying twice to sit in the same seat!”
I purchased three digital tickets for a Premier League fixture from a top ten club. One for me and two for a friend and his adult son. My friend downloaded his and his son’s and I mine. I’ll let “Kevin” take up the story:
The evening before the match, we discovered my son was unable to attend because of a last-minute appointment…
During the afternoon, I checked the wallet on my phone, only to discover that the ticket in my son‘s name had been designated as expired. I thought this may be my fault so I called the supporters’ line again and was advised that this was not so. I was told that the ticket was still valid and I should go to the turnstile on the evening, or the ticket office, if there was a problem. The three of us arrived at the ground and approached the turnstile. My ticket worked but the second did not. The steward very helpfully allowed me out, through a door to go along with my friends to the ticket office. We courteously explained what had happened and the attendant called for an assistant manager.
He asked if we could talk to my son to confirm that he would not be using the ticket. We managed to achieve this – only for —to then tell us that resale was not possible and we would have to purchase a ticket again. Reluctantly, I did so, paying a further £40 for the ticket, only for my friend’s wife to enter the ground with us and sit in the very same empty seat that we’d already purchased!
And here’s an extract from the reply:
…Once a ticket has been purchased, we are unable to make changes to it. All tickets are non-transferable and non-refundable and this is stated in our terms and conditions.
When anyone arrives at the ticket office on a matchday, of course we are immediately trying to find a resolution to a problem and to do our best to assist where possible. We need to have confirmation from the ticket owner before we process anything via their account – Once I had spoken to your son, I realised that the ticket exchange had recently closed and therefore my suggestion of reselling the ticket was no longer possible. The only alternative was then to sell Ana a ticket for the match.
I understand your frustration, however I hope you understand that we are not trying to be difficult, but must be consistent with our policies…
Where is the common sense in all of this? Having asked to speak to the ‘owner’, the offer to transfer the ticket was subsequently withdrawn because of an arbitrary computer deadline.
Empowerment be dammed
A couple of years ago I wrote a piece: “Gloves and Mail Sacks: What happens when you don’t empower your team”
Contrasting other experiences to the Japanese practice/culture of Omotenashi; the pursuit of excellence in customer service by anticipating and exceeding customer needs, I bemoaned the erosion of a service culture across businesses due to a lack of empowerment at the front line.
Two years on I fear with the ubiquity of CRM technology we are at the point where the owner is now chasing the techonogical dog. No one seems to have authority or inclination to question processes that are manifestly dumb.
If business owners don’t empower front line management to make common sense decisions and override computer systems then how can they aspire to excellent customer service?
And finally
Lest we shrug our shoulders, recognise our impotence and accept this is the cost of progress, the New Britain Project report draws a correlation between quiet desparation and disaffection.
Voters are increasingly fed up with a system that wastes their time. The danger is that this frustration is no longer just background noise, it’s now shaping political behaviour. This isn’t just annoying, it’s political. If ministers don’t fix the systems people deal with every day, they risk losing voters to parties that want to tear the whole system down.”
Will “Kevin” go to that club’s matches again? I’m not so sure!
Will I go anywhere near OP again? I am sure – I won’t!
