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I would like to share here two recent service experiences I recently had .

First was with a Water Purifier Company. I was shifting my house and had to shift my Water Purifier. I found out that the Organisation had a Service App and very happily registered on it. Very Smooth experience. Booking an Uninstallation from my existing house and a Installation request in my new residence was very easy. I happily waited for the day (about 5 days away). They also gave on the app details of the person who will visit. On the day no one turned up at the scheduled time. Called up the number and they said they are not the correct agency. Then started my ordeal. Called up their Contact Center – the agents had no clue and asked me to wait. I was desperate as I was to vacate the house. 7 or 8 calls to their contact centre all without result. They had no clue who will service or no method of checking with backend. In fact one of the agents said that I should register a fresh request over call center as ”App requests do not work”. Tweets to the company Twitter handle evoked no response. Emails to their escalation desk met the same fate. It took close to 10 days and multiple calls , missed appointments to ultimately get the service done. 

Second experience was with a travel portal. Had blocked a ticket in April which naturally got cancelled and I got an email from the airline stating that the Credit Shell is with the Travel portal. I was happy and planned to use the same during a future trip. Accordingly went to the portal website and tried booking through a credit shell only to find that credit shell is not available. Surprised checked their service options and saw that only email service options are available. Email was sent with all details . Got an auto reply saying due to Covid there will be delay in revert. No revert for 48 hours. I tried again sending reminders – no luck. Then I tried cancelling the booking . Mind you this is for a booking where airlines cancelled the booking . Surprisingly it allowed me to cancel booking and after 2 days got an email with the refund amount and refund was credited in another 4 days.

These 2 experiences made me wonder about the following

1                    Why would you want to have a digital solution if your service processes are not designed to handle it. It doesn’t make you look bad if you don’t have an app but it definitely brings you down if you have one and don’t know what to do about it .

2                    Why would you be present on Social Media and then ignore customers who reach out to you on Social Media? You are just aggravating the issue further .

3                    Your Contact Centre is your voice of Customer . When they cant escalate a case to you then you are seriously not interested in listening to your customer .

4                    We are in 6th month of this pandemic now in India. In 6 months if you have not been able to find out a way in which to handle your customer queries its your fault – don’t blame the pandemic for it .

5                    Your Processes should be such that they should eliminate the need for customer to reach out to you. The Travel Portal could easily have cancelled the ticket and either refunded me on its own or kept in as a creditshell / ecash for future bookings. Yet it wanted me to do the cancellation (without any prompting or message from the company ) and to write to them for followup and then blamed Covid for the increase in Volume and made me suffer with delayed response . All of this and the extra emails and processing could have been avoided had they been proactive.

I recently heard in a panel discussion that customers have become more demanding during lockdown. Yes its true because in this age of uncertainty & negativity customers do not want to be kept hanging uncertainly waiting for a resolution to their queries. They want their favourite brands to revert to them swiftly and decisively.

As a customer experience professional these two experiences have been huge learning for me and made me realise how important it is to always do a reality check of how effective our processes are. We need to work to a situation where service is non intrusive , hassle free, stress free and seamless in true sense. As one of my mentors said to me once Best Customer Service is when there is no need for Customer Service.