customer care, is it that hard really? (case study)

Pic courtesy of Flickr
If you are a mass customer you had better get used to queues and congestion. Whether it is in retail, banking, telephony or travel: you will often be treated no better than cattle. You will stand around in long lines for hours, or hang on incessantly for an operator; you will sit on hard, tiny, uncomfortable seats; you will have your calls dropped; you will share inadequate bandwidth; you will miss flights because of overbooking; and you will meet a faceless corporate monolith if you try to complain. Because the giant company facing you is most probably a dominant producer in a monopolistic market, the message is clear: if you don’t like what we do, take a hike.- Sunwords.com

When I read articles such as one quoted above, the question that comes to mind; does the customer ask for too much, that he should be ignored so?

A perfect example of poor customer service in Kenya today would be our Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), and for the purposes of this post, I’ll case study Safaricom Kenya. That doesn’t mean the rest are any better, just that being the market leader makes it an easy target for me.

If you have needed customer care services from Safaricom, I’m sure you’re familiar with the busy telephone lines, when they eventually go through, a customer care representative who responds with ‘ I’ll forward your problem to our technical, they’ll get back to you…’ and you can be sure no one will get back to you. Their customer care centres are no better than our banking halls, the only difference being the bank customers get some money at the end of the queue.

Bankelelewrote about an ordeal he went through trying to get an erroneous M Pesa transfer refunded.

Random questions:

How many people know how to activate their phones for internet access offhead?

What’s the number for M Pesa customer service?

You’ll realise such are what crowds the customer care centres of most MNOs today. What would they do to reduce queues, and at the same time serve their customers better?

Off the top of my head, I come up with these:

sms blasts

Currently, MNOs use SMS to advertise their new offerings (which can be quite annoying at times), but they could use these blasts as a customer service tool. For example, sending a blast to all prepaid data lines on how to purchase the various internet bundles, check balance, etc. Information such as M Pesa customer care number, and refund processing could also be transmitted this way.

The difference between this and what they use now like to publicise the bundles is the customer is able to store the information and can access it more readily, than from a piece of paper that was dished out in a traffic jam, and promptly forgotten in the car, or in my case, ‘tidied’ up by my cleaning lady 🙂

dealerships

Most MNOs have thousands of dealerships that are affiliated to them. With basic training, the staff at these dealerships would serve as alternative customer care centres spread throughout the country. Remember most problems are really basic, and as such don’t need technical assistance.

crm systems

A week ago, I travelled to Tanzania, and had the opportunity of using the Vodacom/Safaricom roaming service (which I fondly refered to as a marriage that wasn’t working too well 🙂 ). Coming back home, I would have loved to give feedback on how the service was, with hope that someone would do something about it.

Unfortunately, we don’t have systems where customers get to speak to their service providers. Would it take too much to have customer relationship management system, where customers voluntarily log in their feedback to the MNOs.

All this is based on the assumption that we as customers are as important as the mobile network operators say.

What other tools would be used by large companies to better serve their customers?