Customer Experience is a High-Wire Act and Customer Service is the Net

According to research by the Corporate Executive Board’s Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman and Rick DeLisi, as detailed in their excellent 2013 book The Effortless Experience, a positive product experience generates word-of-mouth more than twice as often as a negative one. However, when it comes to a customer service experience, just the opposite applies: a negative service experience gets shared twice as much as a positive one.

Take a look at the two graphs below, which I copied from their book:

We can speculate about why this is. Perhaps people find it more personally satisfying to tell others about a product they just bought because a great new i-Phone, or a new car with terrific features, or even a really practical household device reflects well on the purchaser’s expertise. But a customer service experience often occurs via the corporate call center, after the product experience isn’t up to snuff. And no one rushes to tell their friends about how great a call center’s service was. Instead, stories of “customer service hell” are simply entertaining to tell, in a “you won’t believe this” kind of way.

In that spirit, a colleague of mine just emailed me his own very entertaining “you won’t believe this” tale of woe at the hands of an airline’s reservations and customer service call center, which I have condensed here:

My wife and I have just had several days of poor customer experience with [XXX airline], trying to upgrade our daughter’s seat on a flight to Indy to be closer to her friends up front. It would cost $67 …or I was going to try to use miles.

First we tried to complete the upgrade online, but were told we had to call the 800# to do an upgrade with miles. So over the weekend we called in several times and went through the IVR each time. It takes several minutes to go through the IVR to get to “Awards Travel” because you first have to attest to all this info about non-hazardous materials, etc. And each time, when you finally get to awards travel they don’t have an option that’s relevant, so you have to ask for a representative. Three times they said: “Due to storms on the East Coast, we are experiencing an extraordinarily high volume of calls. Please call back later.”

When I finally reached someone they said, “Sorry, I can’t help with Awards travel, let me transfer you.” Then they transferred me to a queue where I waited for 90 minutes more, before finally hanging up to go to dinner. Three days later, and after multiple attempts we still haven’t been able to speak with anyone about upgrading with miles, despite the fact that this is what their own web site said we had to do – speak with someone.

The next day my friend sent me an update:

OK, we have a resolution to this story, and you won’t believe this.

My wife called back for a fifth time and got to the awards travel queue where she was put on hold. Twenty minutes later a man picked up and asked if she’d been helped and she told him what she wanted to do. He said “I can’t help you with that” and put her back on hold.

Another 40 minutes later, she finally spoke with someone who could help with rewards upgrades. She wanted to upgrade a coach seat to a premium seat near the front using rewards points, rather than have to pay the $67 fee. She was told that they only allow points to be used to upgrade to first class. My wife said she just wanted to upgrade to the premium seat and was told they couldn’t do that.

So, my wife said, “I’ve been on hold with your company for four hours over the last several days and you’re telling me you can’t help me with this?” and then pleaded, “Is there anything you can do since it’s been such a difficult experience?” She was told there was nothing they could do if she didn’t want to use points to upgrade to first class.

…so that’s the resolution – four hours of effort after seeing instructions online to call for help with points upgrades. And in the end they told us they can’t help her use points to upgrade to a premium seats.

There are plenty of opportunities to screw up your customer service process, and the bigger the screw-up, the more entertaining the story will be, as it's passed around among your customers. I find it highly ironic that whenever a company treats the task of handling customer interactions as a cost of doing business, all the effort that goes in to minimizing that cost actually has the reverse effect.

This story is compelling not because anyone should dictate how an airline allows its own customers to use mileage points to upgrade to Premium Economy. It's entirely within every company's individual discretion to decide its own pricing and product configurations.

The point is, whatever a company's policy is, it should make it easy for customers to get their questions answered online, on its automated web site. Either that, or it needs to make doubly certain that a customer can get an explanation via the call center, and without hours of pointless effort -- bad weather or not. Friction is not only the enemy of customer satisfaction, but it also provides hours of entertainment for other customers.

If delivering a good customer experience were a high-wire act, then customer service would be the net. And when the net fails, even a slight flaw in the experience is fatal, no matter how lofty a company’s intentions are.