12 minutes to answer the phone – Escape Prepay from EZ Pay

I am going to start posting good & bad customer support stories in the hope that some of these companies (particularly the bad ones) can start paying attention. This is the first hopefully one of not many. Alas from my experience, there will be more many more.

Customer support is a balance, it needs to be cost effective for the company offering the service so you don’t want more service reps than you need. This can be expensive. On the other hand, you need enough customer service representatives so that your customer isn’t on the phone for 12 minutes. A waiting customer is an annoyed customer. And you are really playing with fire if you are in an easily duplicated industry Such as EZ Pay is with its Escape pre pay card.

EZ Pay has some serious questions to ask itself, because they have lowered their costs by outsourcing to India (or some such place). I am all for outsourcing, in fact I actively promote it. However if you as the company are going to benefit from reduced costs & in this case reduced quality of service, then surely you have an obligation to have a reasonable number of reps answering the phones.

Outsourcing is about bringing down costs, while maintaining quality and speed of delivery. It should not be seen as a cost only exercise. EZ Pay with its Escape Card have it wrong. The only thing they achieve when the make customers wait 12 minutes for a simple question, is to drive customers to one of the 100 other Pre Pay cards available in the market today.

Pick up your socks EZ Pay. Call me and I will show you how if you wish.

Customer Service and the Web – Are companies taking it too far

Companies are forever trying to save money in all area’s of business. Since arriving in the UK, I have noticed that here in the UK, there seems to be an ever increasing practice to drive customers like mad to the internet. The number of companies that make it so difficult to get hold of a “Real Person” is truly amazing. I along with anyone else can understand the need to lower costs and human resource of any kind is one of a companies largest expenses.

How damaged is your brand if you reduce customer service to a list of answers on a website? Is the potential savings so big that you are willing to alienate your customers and drive them to despair … trying to reach you? What’s more, how does a set of questions on a website, ensure customer retention, prospect retention, deliver great feelings of awesome customer service or up-sell your customer?

The answer

==== It doesn’t ====

What I think many companies will learn the hard way is that automation is great, but you cannot remove the human element from good customer service. Companies will see their customer churn rates ever increase because people that don’t want customer service are those that are looking for the cheapest solution. If you can’t be the cheapest, you will loose out. The truly valuable customers, those that maintain a relationship with their providers will choose to stay with companies that offer “Good Customer Service”.