Why Customer Service is still broken

The year of “Pandemic” has seen a significant increase in number of interactions between customers and brands and a lot more investments made to start-ups, each one claiming to apply ML and AI to make the customer experience “memorable”.

So why does my story still happen?

Saturday May 22, 6:20am San Francisco time. Looking to catch up the stage of the “Giro d’Italia” on TV. It is one of the most challenging climbing stage with stretch of 27% uphill gradient. I am a DirecTV customer (premiere package that includes all the possible channels), so I do a quick search and discover that the stage in on RAI (ch 2021), the State Italian channel recently added by DirecTV.  I push the remote control and discover the channel is not part of my package, so I try to add it going to myDirecTV  account as indicated by the TV screen but I gave up after 10 min not able to find a way to add this new channel to my selection. But I do not give up. I am an avid amateur cyclist and I still have time to catch a good part of the race, so I called and after a short wait Mark pick up the phone. I explain what I want to do and Mark tells me that I can only subscribe the RAI channel if I have a business or commercial account, which I don’t, so after a very short complain I politely thank Mark and close the conversation.

Ten minutes later I see a call back on my phone, the caller id reads “SITEL Operation”. Having worked in this space for sometime I recognize that SITEL is a BPO that operates contact centers so I answer. Mark is on the line telling me that yes I can subscribe to RAI. At that point I had managed to find a live stream on the internet so I decline the offer. At that point Mark offered to waive the $10 monthly fee for six months, so I decided to accept.

What are the miss-steps SITEL/DirecTV made? 

1.     Obviously Mark did not have access to the updated knowledge base and could not know that residential could get access to the RAI channel. 

2.     Neither DirecTV nor SITEL knew my preferences and could predict my strong interest for cycling. (Which is very simple to predict given the fact that I am up at 6:00 am on Saturday to try to watch a stage).

3.     Mark gave away $60 in revenue, amount I would have gladly paid when I called the first time. (Emotion intensity tends to fade over time).

4.     I am sure SITEL/DirecTV might use some type of software to predict intent, track customers, access to knowledge base etc…, so why the agent wasn’t trained to optimize the opportunity.

Think about how often this scenario may repeat and how much money both companies leave on the table. May be it is time to re-think how to create the total experience for both the customers and the agents.

Stay tuned….

#Directv #Sitel #customer_service