antonybrydon

The Ugly :: Dell conceals computer problems and intentionally misleads customers

There's good customer service and bad customer service. But things get don't ugly until you try to cover them up. There's a great New York Times article this week suggesting that's exactly what Dell's done while trying to cover computers that are failing from capacitor problems:

But Dell employees went out of their way to conceal these problems. In one e-mail exchange between Dell customer support employees concerning computers at the Simpson Thacher & Bartlett law firm, a Dell worker states, “We need to avoid all language indicating the boards were bad or had ‘issues’ per our discussion this morning.”

In other documents about how to handle questions around the faulty OptiPlex systems, Dell salespeople were told, “Don’t bring this to customer’s attention proactively” and “Emphasize uncertainty.”

“They were fixing bad computers with bad computers and were misleading customers at the same time,”

A Good Man is Hard to Find :: AT&T, BOA and Why It's So Hard to Find Good Support

First, a Happy Story

I had a good experience with customer service at AT&T recently.I had traveled to Canada and paid $50 up front for a 50MB data package that was explained on the phone as a one-time purchase, but had been billed a recurring monthly fee for a service I wasn't using. I didn't it notice for eight months (auto-debit, doh). The rep was helpful and even able to credit me during the call. The good experience shocked me a bit, and shocked some of my friends who heard the news.

Now Back to Your Regular Programming

Salesforce.com's ServiceCloud rises above the crowd

 Salesforce.com announced ServiceCloud earlier this month, billed as a "next generation platform for customer service," allowing companies to monitor and tap into customer conversations all over the web - i.e., Facebook, community blogs, message boards, twitter, etc.

It's an excellent innovation, and important on several dimensions:

• For companies, it's a badly needed interface to a social web that consumers are increasingly turning to discuss products and companies, a structured way of integrating traditional CRM and ad hoc initiatives on platforms like Twitter. It's also an opportunity to create a better experience, better brand, and stronger net promoters cores by delivering a new level of proactive customer support.

• For consumers, it offers a new opportunity to be heard and helped in their preferred avenue, and not forced through the company's preferred CS channels and painful 800 numbers, and reflects a shift in the balance of power from company to consumer.

• For salesforce.com, it allows them to bridge an increasingly relevant social web with enterprise CRM, to keep CRM core and central and the sales and support, and to rise above (and aggregate) a crowd of  new channels emerging for customer support like GetSatisfaction and Twitter.

Taking sides with GetSatisfaction

GetSatisfaction is working to become the Switzerland of customer service, a neutral intermediary between warring factions of customers and companies on the CS battleground. They're off to a good start, with 413K unique visitors per month and a good set of investors (O'Reilly Alphatech Ventures, Jeff Clavier's SoftTechVC, First Round Capital).

It's an interesting experiment. I'm paying close attention, because it challenges one of the lessons I've learned: serve a single master and take a side.

At Visible Path, we tried to simultaneously serve the sales representative and the sales manager. The goals of these two audience were often different, the tensions often significant, and it was difficult to serve both. Ray Lane at Kleiner Perkins often depicted the struggle in pictures like this:

The customer service list

The consistently poor levels of customer service in the U.S. have astounded me for 10+ years. The ingredients seem fairly consistent:

Start with long hold times, a painful phone tree, the requirement to key in dozens of digits, or a painfully inaccurate voice recognition system. Introduce a underpaid and undereducated customer service representative who's thinking ability has been compromised by a set of scripts and screen pops, without any creative problem solving skills and without the autonomy to go off script.