Service Untitled » Service Calls

Customer service experience with Comcast

Cheryl — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 05:33:14 +0000

I live in a community with a Homeowner’s Association, and Comcast high speed internet is part of our package, so basically there are no other options. The past few weeks have been wrought with intermittent service, and as is true to form for those of us dependent on the internet, the problem gets very frustrating.

I repeatedly called the first level of support, but as it is with most companies, the representatives are not very skilled. Dare not deviate from the procedure the representative orders you to follow; otherwise their standard response is they cannot be of help. Each time I was assured the problem had been fixed, and for a day or two that may have been true, but the problem kept happening. When finally a technician appointment was scheduled for a few days later, the internet was working and nothing was done to resolve the problem. It reminded me of taking my car into the dealer when I hear a noise; that noise is never apparent when the mechanic is listening, but it’s still there. More calls to the customer representatives; more technicians coming to my house, and eventually a new modem (a different brand) has seemed to solve the problem.

Comcast claims to proactively monitor equipment and empowers their customer service representatives to perform home checks to determine some of the causes of trouble and to focus on network reliability known as “node health.” Their Customer Guarantee briefly includes:

A 30 day money back guarantee on all equipment and services.
A promise to treat you and your home with courtesy and respect.
Answer your questions at your convenience 24/7.
Easy to understand statements and bills.
Best and most video choices.
Address any problems customers experience.
Schedule appointments at customers convenience and be mindful of customer’s time.

While I commend Comcast’s pledge of service, my own experience would suggest that customer service representatives need more training and be able to either send a customer to the next level or be better trained to evaluate initial problems and how to more efficiently deal with customers. These people are first impressions, and as the old adage rings out, there is only one chance to make a first impression.

On the Comcast blog, Rick Germano, SVP Customer Operations writes about how Comcast employees took it upon themselves to help others in the recent heavy snowstorms in the Northeast. Some employees drove their coworkers into the office; others helped to plow out driveways, some slept in the offices to be ready to help or even prepared food. That truly shows the ability of employees to think out of the box and go beyond the basic manual, so why not follow that lead in the customer service department?

photo credit: dmuth

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Comcast Customer Service

Douglas — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 18:41:34 +0000

ISPs have a reputation of providing terrible customer service. My experience with Comcast over the last two weeks or so was an example of the company living up to its reputation.

I had been having intermittent issues with my Internet for a while. Comcast had been out once before, looked at the computer for about a minute, and said nothing was wrong. Everything was fine for a month or so and then the issues started happening again. My Internet would go out for an hour or two and then come back. No apparent reason for it going out randomly – it just did.

Since I couldn’t stand my Internet randomly going out, I called Comcast again. They tried to troubleshoot (which consists of blaming my router for the problem) and realized they couldn’t get a connection to the modem. A service call was scheduled for later in the week after 5 PM.

I was home by 5 PM and waited until 8 PM before calling Comcast. I called them and they said the service call had been canceled. They didn’t know who canceled it or why it was canceled, but the service call was canceled. I had waited at home for three hours and the call was canceled.

They had no additional information about why it was canceled, which was ridiculous. Their best answer is that they (the people who do the service calls) sometimes call in advance to make sure someone is home. Apparently, I had to wait home all day, in case someone from Comcast called. I asked to talk to a supervisor, but instead spoke to a “team lead.” He told me that he would try to get it rescheduled to Saturday (my preferred time), but at the moment, the only available time was Wednesday after 5 PM. I told him that I wanted to hear back from Comcast by 11 PM that night with a yes, no, or still working on it answer. He assured me that I would hear back.

As 11 PM rolled by, I had not heard anything from Comcast. They failed to do what they said they would do once again. I called on Tuesday evening to confirm my Wednesday service call and it was still scheduled.

At exactly 5:00 PM on Wednesday, my phone rang. It was the Comcast represenative confirming I was home and available. He told me he was in the area and would be there in a few minutes. By 5:15 PM, he was working on my computer. Apparently, nothing was wrong with it. After trying to sell me a modem about 5 times, he checked outside to confirmed nothing was wrong at the street level, and left.

The entire experience was absolutely terrible at worst and mediocre at best. I’ve written quite a bit about service calls and this experience was not the best by any means.

Companies that do service calls can learn a few lessons from my Comcast experience:

Communicate the times very clearly.
Never cancel a service call without talking to the customer.
If a service call is canceled, ensure you record all the details.
The company’s central office should have a better idea about what the field representatives are doing.
If you make a promise (whether it be to show up or to return a phone call), keep it. If you’re unable to keep that promise, don’t make it.

Technorati tags: Comcast, Service Calls, Service Call, Customer Service

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Outstanding Blog Meme

Douglas — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 22:05:37 +0000

There has been an “Oustanding Blog” meme going around, which Service Untitled is proudly a part of. It was started by Troy from OrbitNow. There are a lot of great blogs here and there is a lot you can learn from them. Feel free to post the list on your blog.

Technorati tags: Oustanding Blog, Meme, Blog, Outstanding Blogs, Troy Worman

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Papa John’s Customer Service – A Pizza Experience

Douglas — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 15:23:14 +0000

I’ve written a very popular series on service calls, but as far as I can recall, I’ve never written about delivery experiences. I read about one the other day at Phil’s blog, Make it Great. Meikah, Becky, and Maria all wrote about Phil’s experience and I’ll also add my two cents.

Redundancy. I don’t know about the pizza delivery industry, but in technical industries, redundancy is important. Can’t they call in another driver or like Maria suggested, have another employee deliver the pizza? Redundant solutions should be available to prevent problems.
Work around the system. Robert Stephens says that his employees can break policies if it is for the purpose of “protecting the company’s reputation” – the store manager should have broken a policy and issued a gift card and/or refund to Phil.
Keep everyone in the loop. When Phil arrived at the store, the pizza was on a truck somewhere. They should have made him a new pizza for him while he was there and/or started making it as they knew he was leaving – for free.
Keep everyone in the loop (part 2). If the store knew there were going to be delays, they should have called and/or emailed Phil to let him know about it and offer other options.
Follow-up. The company should have followed up with Phil after the experience. He should have gotten a phone call later in the evening to confirm he got the pizza and later, a nice email or letter from a corporate executive or the manager apologizing and including a $25 or $50 gift card. Don’t be afraid to bribe customers – it may really help make the peace.
Apologize. Throughout the entire experience, Papa John’s should have been apologizing, explaining, and fixing. They should train their employees and managers to know how to apologize and to fix things.
Watch. If Papa John’s watched the blogosphere, they would have seen Phil’s blog post and dealt with it. Now, they would have to deal with the post on several other customer service blogs and all of the commenters who read about Phil’s experience on them.

I know that if I were in Phil’s situation, I would have given up and ordered from someone else. He was extremely patient and much more mellow about it than an average customer would have been. I admire his patience.

Have a great weekend! If you decide to order pizza, hopefully it will be a better experience.

Technorati tags: Papa John’s, Pizza, Delivery, Service Calls, Customer Service Experience, Customer Service, Blogging, Phil Gerbyshak

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Robert Stephens – Part 3

Douglas — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 16:19:10 +0000

This is the third part of the interview with Robert Stephens, the founder of The Geek Squad. In this part of the interview, he discusses how they manage schedules, the common challenges, what they are doing to improve, and more.

Question: How do you handle scheduling, especially when Agents have to go to more than one customer per day?
Answer: We have a highly advanced system that I originally developed myself that is all web-based. Agents have the newest smart phones with wi-fi and are dispatched via web. The system optimizes the scheduling algorithms kind of like how Google Maps auto-routes you efficiently to your destination – ours does that in real time. If there is a cancellation, it will automatically fill your block with the most efficient job nearest your next driving path, and we even print the invoices on your printer and process all the payments so there is no paper involved. It works quite well.

Question: What are the most common and frustrating customer service challenges that the Geek Squad encounters?
Answer: The biggest challenge is probably the capacity issue. How do you staff up and predict what you are going to be needed for? You don’t know when you are going to have a problem. Even though a lot of what we do isn’t repair, it’s “I bought this thing, I want help setting it up”, but how do you plan for that? It’s like an airline – you want to have X numbers of flights, but you can’t have too many empty seats. Capacity and utilization rates are a key problem.

That is why I think applying Six Sigma to that might be kind of interesting. There hasn’t been a ton of research done about service applied with Six Sigma. We’ve been talking with Service Master about their efforts and stuff like that. If you staff too much, your profit drops. If you don’t staff enough, then your phone lines are on hold too long. That is a really tough problem.

If you look at how we tackled the problem (by joining forces with Best Buy), we are able to park that potential energy and capacity and utilize it (that is why we call them double agents – they have a double role) – when they are not on a house call, they can go to the store. We can continue to utilize them for machines that may be sitting on the bench waiting to get fixed.

Basically, it is time versus money. If time is more important to you, you have to pay me more money. I can come out and do it while you wait at your home. If money is more important to you, then if you give me more time, you bring it to me and I will get it done within a couple of days, but will cut you a good price. That is one answer. The new remote service too is another emerging model that works very well. At three in the morning, I can more efficiently remotely fix your computer than sending a house call at three in the morning (I’d have to pay that person a lot of money to get up out of bed earlier). Speed and quality are issues that you are constantly dealing with.

That is a problem that everybody has – so it isn’t a problem unique to us, just inherent in the industry.

Question: What are the most common frustrations customers experience when dealing with the Geek Squad?
Answer: The frustrations are the same. The frustration starts with the computer not working. Their frustrations they may experience with the Geek Squad are things like: the check in process can be a pain and something we are trying to work on. I don’t like the idea may have to stand there for 10 minutes holding whatever it is they are looking for us to fix. We are looking for ways to redesign it through ways like lowering the counter height so you don’t have to live anything up. Ideally, I’d like it so you wouldn’t have to lift your fingers from the parking lot into the store. The physical aspect of that I think is important.

People like things done right the first time. That is the next most important thing. When we are done working on it, they don’t want to have to come back, especially if they brought it in. Plus, they don’t want their computers to be down.

Once that is taken care of, then they like it to be done fast. If you are very fast, but don’t do very good work, all you are going to do is churn bad experiences much quicker. We’ve learned that people will forgive delays if they get specific information and you keep them informed. If they know you are trying, that is probably the most important thing. It is when they think that you don’t care that it upsets them.

We are really in the perfection business, which is incredibly different. It explains one reason why there has never been a nationwide service like this – it is hard to be good at.

Question: How did the Geek Squad getting acquired by Best Buy affect its customer service?
Answer: We dated for a couple of years before we got married. Obviously when you scale from 50 employees to 12,000, you are going to have some glitches in the system. All of the systems we had built independently (like our scheduling software, which was just running up until recently, held up quite well) had to be scaled. It gave us access to resources we didn’t have as a small company. It also created problems. Just like when eBay had outages when they had to scale up to the billions of transactions they do now.

Trying to make our scheduling software talk to Best Buy’s cash register system so you can order service inside the store didn’t exist before, so we had to build that. Integrating with the giant behemoth that is Best Buy took the most work.

Teaching retail, which traditionally only relies on manufacturing to market a product, and then you just sell it when the customer walks in the door. Selling service is not some box we pull off the shelf and put in your shopping cart – we have to kind of explain it and help people understand it and why they might want to consider it. Some of these gadgets are not as easy to setup on your own (like wireless routers).

Question: What is the Geek Squad doing to improve its customer service?
Answer: Simplifying the processes.

To give you a recent example, Best Buy recently went to a concierge-type service. Most companies say press 1 for this, 2 for this, 3 for this. When you call, 1-888-BEST-BUY, they took away everything except for two options. Press 1 if you know what you are looking for 2 if you just want to talk to a human right away. You would think that increases the cost in human to answer those extra calls. On most days, they save money and on busy days, it costs neutral, it pays for itself. People were getting so lost in the IVR system that the extra phone charges were saved and paid for the employees. We are doing a lot of things like that.

The check in/check out process – we are trying to simplify it. We just came out with a new scheduling system, which optimizes schedules. It allows agents to show up faster because it can kind of predict if they are running long. That, in turn, increases the hours that they are available.

Increasing the training that they are provided. We spend a lot of time scaling them up and I never really had a formal training program, and we are starting to put those in place. We launched an internal one where we can track each individual (which courses they have taken, which ones they need, etc.) and tie that so that before they expect the next bonus or raise we can say hey you have to take these classes and certifications. The new Vista that is coming out is an example. Everybody is getting training now for about a month and a half from now when the new home Vista comes out. There is no end.

We are doing a Six Sigma project on redo rates. How can we increase the statistical probability that your computer will be done right the first time (not just the problem you are brining it in for, but also making sure we don’t cause any new problems). Then there are little things like if you leave your laptop with us, making sure to give you the cord so you don’t have to come back to get it. Little things like that – bazillions of details and there are always new ones that we focus on.

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Service Calls: Conclusion

Douglas — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 16:24:49 +0000

The service calls series went rather smoothly. I don’t have anything to add, but here are the main points:

Ensure time slots are as small as possible. Never arrive before or after the time slot.
Always try to follow the Etiquette of Service Calls.
Always call to confirm and keep the customer in the loop.
Make service calls personal.

Service calls can be a good customer service experience if they are done right. Hopefully this short series has provided you with some information about how to properly do service calls.

Very short post today, but I don’t have too much to talk about.

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The Horror of Time Slots

Douglas — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 15:53:00 +0000

It is every customer’s nightmare when a customer service representative says anything to do with a timeslot. “We’ll call you back between 1 PM and 9 PM”, “The technician will be at your house between 8 AM and 7 PM”, “We’ll start caring about our customers and trying to improve customer service between the years 2035 and 3261.” The list goes on and on and it gets even more frustrating.

The best way to fix the issue with customers being inconvenienced with timeslots is simply by getting rid of them. No timeslots are the best timeslots.

Unfortunately, since we don’t live in “Customer Service Paradise”, no time slots are unlikely to happen. They do have a function, but they are almost entirely created to make it easier for the company and not the customer (there is a reason the word customer is in customer service, not company service).

The second best way to deal with timeslots is to make them as small as possible without them being wrong. If customers are told a representative will be there between 4 PM and 5 PM, the representative better show up at that time. Not earlier and not later.

Throughout the timeslot, the customer should be kept in the loop. If the representative is running early, late, or even on-time, he or she should call the customer and let them know the status. A call before the representative is ready to leave the previous stop is an excellent idea and will make the customer sure that they haven’t been forgotten about and that someone will be showing up on time(slot).

The key to timeslots are to keep them short and keep the customer informed. They are almost always customer service nightmare (despite how well they are done), but it’s best to keep them at acceptable instead of bad.

Tips:

Do not be early. The customer may not be home.
Do not be late. The customer will be home and will be furious.
Call early in the time slot if you’re going to be late.
Follow the Etiquette of Service Calls throughout the whole process.

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Etiquette of Service Calls (including Time Slots)

Douglas — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 17:55:00 +0000

There is a lot of etiquette involved with service calls. Again, it is the little things that make a big difference. I think it is best to outline them in order that they occur:

Before an Appointment is Made:

Have the ways to contact your support methods clearly published.
Menus should be simple and hold time should be reasonable.
Have customers do troubleshooting steps (if necessary), but make that experience pleasant and personal.
If available troubleshooting options have been exhausted, arrange a service call.
Have the same representative arrange the service call – do not transfer the customer.
Arrange a service call at the customer’s convenience, not the company’.
Keep time slots to a minimum (1 or 2 hours is probably okay, but anything above that is really pushing it). If possible, have exact times (we’ll be there at 2:00 PM).
Get directions.
Read back the service call information to the customer and confirm.
Ask them if they have any questions, comments, or concerns.
After the customer hangs up, go back to the computer system and verify the service call appointment was made correctly.

After an Appointment is Made:

Someone should verify service call appointments daily to ensure they have been entered correctly.
The customer should be called and asked to confirm the service call appoitment 24 hours prior. If the appointment was made within that 24 hour period, do not call.
At the beginning of the time slot or about 1 hour before the representative is expected to arrive at the customer’s home or office, have the representative call to confirm any directions and the time of the appointment as well as give the customer an update (running on time, early, etc.).

During the Appointment (steps for the representative):

If possible, park on the street (wide streets only) or in a nearby parking space. Do not annoy neighbors, but try to avoid the customer’s driveway (cars leak, etc.). If you need to park in the driveway, confirm that with the customer before the appointment (see the previous step above).
Wipe your feet thoroughly.
Use the doorbell. If there is no doorbell, knock three or four times.
When the customer answers the door, introduce yourself and greet the customer by name.
Wipe your feet again (this time it’s for show).
Ask the customer if they would prefer you put covers on your shoes before entering. (They have plastic things you can put around your shoes.)
Give any personalized gifts as necessary.
Do what you have to do to fix the problem.
Do not bring any food or beverages in the house. You can ask if the customer is okay with you brining water in the house, but if they say no, it’s no.
Avoid going in and out if possible.

After the Appointment:

Call 48 hours later and ask if the problem is fixed or if the customer had any problems. Give a basic customer satisfaction survey.
Call in another two weeks and ask if everything is okay.
Send a card or a letter in the mail another week (total three weeks later) thanking the customer for their time and patience and apologizing about any issues.

Throughout the Entire Process:

Everyone involved should be friendly.
The customer’s convenience and satisfaction should be the ultimate goal.
Hold times and amount of transfers required should be as little as possible.
The customer should be addressed by name.

If you do all of those things, you’ll have an amazing customer service experience for your service calls. The keys are to keep time slots as small as possible, be nice, and confirm everything.

On Monday, we’re going to have some unrelated content. Then, on Tuesday, there is going to be more about time slots.

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