How technology changed Customer Service to Customer Diss Service

Having decided to embark on a rather late journey into the world of tech, a significant part of my waking hours since the past many months have been a huge learning curve. One part of the learning curve is the actual stuff of building our virtual product in the form of an app. The other part of the learning curve is to deal with the vagaries of the service providers that are essential to give the app a life so that our potential users can enjoy our offerings.

The former has been equal parts fascinating, challenging, exciting and fulfilling – it’s like a baby taking shape in a virtual womb. The latter … the less said the better. The former is about dealing with fellow humans. The latter has been about dealing with sundry chatbots, mailbots and their ilk.

All of us are well aware by now that the app ecosystem is a duopoly. And you can’t be present in one and not in the other store. That’s business hara-kiri. Now, as part of the process of launching an app we are expected to fill up a detailed questionnaire basis which the store agrees to host the app - at a cost, of course. A bit like a landlord of a virtual real estate. The questionnaire kind of looks like the one that you fill up while applying to a US Visa, for example. Questions that make you question the intelligence of those responsible for the questionnaire. Like asking you to declare whether you are a terrorist, if you deal in narcotics, or child trafficking, etc. Questions that you basically grin and bear since you are the needy ones. So we filled up all the responses, including for specific ones like ‘whether we have objectionable content, violence, pornography, etc on our app’, and which regions of the world we will be present in. In case you are wondering what our responses were, the answer to the former was a firm NO, and the answer to the latter was ONLY INDIA.

We pressed Submit.

48 hours later we received an auto-generated mail stating that our app was rejected in South Korea!

So we hunkered down and re-filled the questionnaire making some minor adjustments in some responses.

Submit.

Another 48 hours.

Another rejection. This time from North America.

Repeated the above steps.

48 hours.

No rejection. But instead an Adults Only rating, this time by Europe. Which essentially meant that it was being assumed that we were planning to run a Pornhub proxy app out of India.

The mailbot, however, was generous enough to tell us that we could write to the ratings body and file an appeal if we were not in agreement with the rating. So we did. The ratings body promptly responded stating that since the app was not yet Live on the app store, it was an issue that only the app store could resolve. Pillar to post and back to pillar.

Out of sheer frustration we re-applied. Hooray!! This time we were through and could upload our app on the app store with a rating of – hold your breath – 3+!! Which meant that we could then be publicly flogged for getting toddlers hooked on to real money gaming.

All app store outposts around the world were having a go at us except the one where we wanted to upload our app. Was it something to do with geopolitical tensions because India has been flexing its 56 inches of late? Whatever the reason, the Rest Of World outpost of the app store, of which India is a part of, remained stoically silent.

In the space of a couple of weeks our app had gone from being a Pornhub proxy to a kid’s playground. And we asked ourselves …

Our multiple unsuccessful applications activated some empathy chord in the app store’s systems. So we received a seemingly empathetic mail acknowledging our multiple attempts. It also provided us with a link for us to register our feedback. Now common sense demands that if one is being asked to give feedback on one’s unsuccessful attempts at doing something, it means they are obviously dissatisfied. But it seems that technology doesn’t have common sense. On clicking the link, a questionnaire opened that had the cheek to check our level of satisfaction with the interactions and asked us to elaborate on what problems we were facing. We grabbed the opportunity to give the worst possible ratings on the satisfaction index and elaborated on the problem we were facing. It’s been more than two weeks since our detailed reply. No comebacks.

We have now left the matter to be resolved by our developer who finally acquiesced to rustle up some contact they have in the app store company and try to see if the system can be circumvented while our app application circumnavigates the world getting rejections from assorted countries who seem to have some beef with India.

So much for technology!

Our travails don’t end there. Since our app will have users depositing money to play, and occasionally withdrawing their winnings, a payment gateway and a payouts facility is most critical for conducting business. Here too the entire process resides online. Here too a lot of documents, proofs, profiles, answers to inane questions, etc are asked for – rightfully so since one can’t mess around with people’s money – and are submitted. But a pillar to post and back to pillar scenario unfolded here as well. The payment gateway said they can’t part with their APIs - permissions, for the uninitiated – unless the app is Live in the app store ecosystem. And the app will not go Live unless it has a working payment gateway facility. Here too mailbots and chatbots abound in the online application systems. The only human interactions we had was when we got calls from some call center hubots (human robots) just to reconfirm the status of our online application – which wasn’t going anywhere. The reason I call them hubots is because they are programmed to stick to a script. Asking them any pertinent questions is of no consequence as it is out of syllabus for them. They are not even ashamed to respond with ‘I don’t know saar … you will have to ask your query online!’

Same is the case with our cloud service provider – another essential of the app economy and ecosystem. There is just no human interaction for us to have a meaningful conversation to better understand what is being dished out to us for whatever are the fees that are promptly being charged month on month. Where the tap is turned off were we to inadvertently miss out on making a payment by a few hours because of the time difference with the part of the world where we are being billed from. If this is the level of service from what is arguably the world’s best consumer oriented and consumer focused company in the world that prides itself for being the only A to Z store on the web, then I shudder to think how bad its competitors must be.

The entire experience has been like being in a maze with no way out – a bit like Abhimanyu in the chakravyuh, being attacked from all sides and fighting valiantly … no need to worry, though ... our fate is definitely not going to be as dire.

How we have managed to navigate this maze and get ourselves hosted on one of the two app stores is something only we know. The secret recipe: tech coupled with the option of human interaction. One of the two of the app store ecosystem duopoly, in spite of also belonging to a Humongous Tech behemoth (all the Big Tech companies have gone wayyy beyond being just Big) they have surprisingly kept the option of human interaction as one of the first recourses to the application process. And lo behold … a couple of conversations with some actual humans and we were given the go ahead.

If you think this post is becoming an unbridled rant, then check this post out: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-customer-service-indian-tech-companies-so-bad-ani-gupta/. It makes me look like a saint.

In a way modern day customer service has increasingly started resembling and behaving like the grievance cells of government or public service / utility enterprises.

While I personally abhor the word ‘servant’ and its largely negative connotations, there is a reason why those who work in these enterprises are called public servants. Their primary responsibility and mandate is to ‘serve’ the needs of the public. Which they don’t. And when they do it is only when grease in the form of currency notes is applied.

A friend of mine astutely pointed out that any processes, rules or regulations involving government bodies and their kin are deliberately designed in a convoluted manner to ensure that the public is inconvenienced to the maximum. Only then do the public ‘servants’ feel they are relevant since the aggrieved public will have to beg or cajole to get their work done which the public ‘servant’ is to anyway do as part of their job description. If day to day affairs get carried out seamlessly then there would be no need of such a massive machinery full of paper pushers and ‘kalam ke ghulam’ (servants of the letter of the law, never the spirit). A similar scenario seems to be playing out with even private sector conglomerates as with their sheer size they have started resembling government enterprises themselves.

It wasn’t like this not so long ago.

I remember my wonderful experience of top notch customer service when I had picked up a Kindle long before it was launched in India. On my flight back from the US, the hand bag in which I had kept it was submerged in the overhead compartment under other bags. This led to the e-ink to spread out in psychedelic patterns on the screen, albeit in B&W. Completely crestfallen, I decided to give a try to the famed customer service of Amazon. I had no hopes because Amazon was not even present in the country then. I dialled a 1800 number, some genial lady attended my call, I told her what had genuinely happened and asked if there was something that could be done. She said ‘Sure’, confirmed my India address, and told me that she had placed instructions for a replacement piece to be shipped through express shipping, and if there was anything else that I wanted assistance on. For a moment I thought I would ask if I could kiss her, but sheepishly asked her how I should be paying for the new piece, and she very sweetly told me that there were no costs involved. This experience is 13 years old, and I still remember the name of the lady – Claire.

To clarify, my experience wasn’t wonderful because I got a free replacement. It was wonderful because someone was empowered to take a decision that would result in delight.

There was also a time in the not so distant past that I was faced with a major and indeterminate flight delay on reaching the airport. I wanted to reschedule my flight to an earlier available flight of another airline. I had called a customer service number of the ticketing service provider, managed to speak to an executive, explained my problem, was told I would have to pay nominally extra for this last minute change, and on agreeing to that he promptly mailed me a booking token, told me to go the airline’s window, show it, pay the differential fare (the rest of the fare would be adjusted by the service provider directly with the airline) and get my new ticket. Try doing that in today’s day and age with all the fancy technology at our disposal. No chance. You will just be punching various numbers on your keypad just trying to get out of the loop.

But then there are also the horrible examples which have started far outnumbering the good ones of late. Many of you reading this will have their own dreadful account of dealing with the DO NOT REPLY TO THIS MAIL mails which are sent with those words always in ALL CAPS in the subject field – why posture the pretence of customer service when you do not want to have anything to do with the mail’s receiver? It beats the very nature of mail - of being a two way means of communication. Many of you will also recall some inane conversation with a chatbot with a fixed menu of topics that you can chat with them about, which invariably will never have the topic that you want to speak to someone about.

The reason I chose to break down the word Disservice into Diss Service in the title of this post is because customer service has become exactly that - a service that disses its customers.

How did customer service get so bad? If technology is meant to be an enabler, then how come so many of us feel disabled when it comes to customer service?

Salesforce defines Customer Service as “the support you offer your customers — both before and after they buy and use your products or services — that helps them have an easy, enjoyable experience with your brand … delivering proactive and immediate support to customers anytime on the channel of their choice — phone, email, text, chat, and more … Of late it has become, and does, anything but that.

A recent article in Financial Times states that “data from regulatory bodies shows a steep rise in complaints and plunging levels of consumer satisfaction, and that everyone seems to be in some kind of private war with a barely contactable company.” Jo Causon of the Institute of Customer Service hits the nail on its head when she says that

“Technology can be a force for good when designed with the customer in mind, rather than designed by the tech team to cut out costs.”

The problem is not only that we’re getting poor service, it’s that it has also become harder to complain about it.

Businesses are taking longer than ever to resolve complaints. As the article states, “If firms want to cut costs by using chatbots or other technology to filter out simpler queries, the staff they do employ need to be capable of solving increasingly complex issues. After wasting time exhausting a chatbot’s doom loop of questions, the sight of three flashing dots usually signifies that your problem has been shunted up the chain to an actual person. Yet how often do you get through to this person only to find that they stick rigidly to a script?”

Ease of user experience due to giant leaps in technology in the products and services we consume has led to an equal amount of complexity in the kind of problems it throws up. The intuitive product or service design that is being sold to customers should also be equally intuitive and service oriented when it comes to post purchase problems that could crop up. To answer those problems, qualified staff is necessary who are able to think on their feet, assuage the customer, suggest some stop gap solutions while assuring complete redressal.

However, the time taken to reach these individuals is too long and too long winded as customers have to navigate the escalation matrixes (matrices, for the purists) that these tech companies have set up. These matrixes are like levels of security where each succeeding level renders the preceding level redundant. Escalation matrixes also result in limited powers of redressal for the lower levels. Hence one never gets to encounter the likes of Claire who had been my first and only port of call and who had been empowered to take a decision to replace my Kindle and ship it through express shipping without conferring with her ‘supervisor’.

It has been bandied about since the last decade or so that with technology all businesses, irrespective of the category they operate in, would become service businesses – i.e. they would have to have service industry levels of customer focus and centricity. A very lofty statement indeed. But where does one go, and what does one do, when even service businesses like hospitality and travel also fall prey to the omnipresent bot onslaught?

A recent experience the wife had with a hospitality brand speaks volumes of the lackadaisical approach towards tech adoption. She was ‘chatting’ (it should actually be called a textbot instead of a chatbot) on the bot about confirming a booking she was doing online. The chatbot asked her to take a screenshot and upload it on the chat. On taking the screenshot the chat window would disappear and a fresh chat would initiate itself. After a couple of times, the wife gave up. Did anyone at the company even know about this, let alone care to fix the bug? Do they even realise they are losing out on customers thanks to their appalling customer service?

Airlines and airline ticketing service providers as well as financial service providers thrive on the * mark to every small or big thing they display on their sites. The * is their best CYA mechanism in the face of rising costs of operation and decreasing margins. This may help us understand why some of the most hated companies are so profitable and why customer service, unfortunately, remains so frustrating.

So what does one do when technology becomes a disabler?

Throw in more technology, obviously. AI is already being deployed in the automated customer service systems which are being trained to listen into conversations to spot emotional highs and lows, change in tonality, change in volume, recognise anger and frustration, etc. Systems are being geared to automatically escalate customer calls to a human interface as against a chatbot or IVR. But not all companies are capable of investing into a live-and-learn technology that has no fixed destination of error-free perfection. Research shows that most customers prefer phone to other communication options (e.g. text/chat, email, face to face). Text/IM comes in a distant second. While companies are rapidly moving towards technology alternatives to traditional customer service by phone, customers seem to prefer discussing their customer service issues by phone to a live agent. No wonder the twain will never meet.

There is a lesson that a lot of industries can take from banks. While banks have been at the forefront of technology adaptation, and have also got their own chatbots and automated customer service centres, they haven’t compromised on their retail presence which in some cases has actually gone up of late. They realise that ATMs and IVR menus and chatbots have a limited role in interacting with disgruntled customers. And it is not always to do with being disgruntled either. Customers just like to walk into a bank to make a deposit, exchange some pleasantries with the staff and meet other people. They also know whom to blame when faced with ineptitude, as against some faceless digital entity.

While not all businesses need to have a brick and mortar presence to interact with customers, why can’t customer service agents of a lot of companies that are doubling down on tech adoption be provided with video calling facility? Just the fact that there is a person that one can see and interact with can be a big factor in assuaging frayed tempers. It might lead to irate customers behaving well since talking to someone one can see, instead of a faceless voice, is known to have a calming effect. Why cannot the powers of social media be channelised to directly address customer complaints and problems? Why should only customers use social media as a tool to socially embarrass companies? Why can’t ‘social listening’ that all corporations do be changed to ‘social talking’ with customers? Why can’t a disgruntled customer be addressed 1-0-1 by giving them the option of sending a DM to the company’s customer service agent?

Sounds like customer service utopia, doesn’t it? But unlike utopia it is an achievable aim.

A lot of successful businesses became that on the back of fantastic customer service experiences. The leaders of these companies had their ears to the ground by going on market visits and mystery shopper visits. They got a first hand feel of what and how their customers were actually experiencing, thinking, behaving. Of late the tendency is to rely on technology and statistics and metrics to evaluate level of customer experience and satisfaction. It is common knowledge that data interpretation, like law, lies in the abilities of the data analyst. What is that quote … that data is like a bikini - it reveals the unnecessary while hiding the essentials.

In an online world, the need to have a human connect with all stakeholders in any business is vital. Social media, as suggested by me above, can play a small role, though nothing can beat investing correctly in customer service - a tough call given stagnant sales and reduced margins. But then it is also equally true that customers don’t mind paying a little more if it means getting better service. Tough call that. Or is it really?

A simple thing to keep in mind is to treat customer service department as a destination - not a pit stop.

In today’s day and age, when a customer calls Customer Service it means that they have already explored other avenues like speaking to the retailer, scoured the company website for solutions, and texted with automated bots. They are already on the edge, but have still taken the effort to give it one more shot by wanting to speak to someone just so that they are able to explain their problem. The least that can be done is to give them a good listen and then follow it up with a solution - if not then and there, then at least by following up on it. Believe you me it really doesn’t take much to have your customer service department staffed with many Claire’s.

An aggrieved customer is like a woman scorned - hell hath no fury that comes even close. And fury can take on different avatars. Like in the case of this band who decided to sing it out and post it for everyone to listen, thereby embarrassing the shit out of the company that refused to listen. I urge you to give it a listen. It’s hilarious.

In my case, since my partners and me don’t have the requisite singing skills, we continue to languish in search of the silver bullet that will get our app uploaded on to the store.

Be braver. Be kinder.

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Though I do watch a fair amount of content, I haven’t yet watched any content that deals with customer service. But I did chance upon a series that seems very promising and have added it to my watchlist. Below is its trailer. Looks like a hilarious one.

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