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    Waiting for Service
    Waiting for Service
    Waiting for Service
    Ebook107 pages1 hour

    Waiting for Service

    By Amas Tenumah

    ()

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    About this ebook

    You hate waiting in line or on the phone for customer service. There have been plenty of books about customer service, that all seem to offer "secrets" to improve customer service. This is not that book. I instead want to focus on Why customer Service is so broken and give you the secrets to get around it. C

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBien LLC
    Release dateDec 25, 2021
    ISBN9780578256436
    Waiting for Service

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      Book preview

      Waiting for Service - Amas Tenumah

      INTRODUCTION

      It has been a nice career for me. I plan to tell the whole truth, and it won’t be popular. I wrote this book because I had to. The truth is your favorite companies could fix customer service in one day if they really wanted to. They won’t. and I know why.

      I do not need to convince you that Customer service is broken. No need to take my word for it. I am simply saying it is raining bad service outside, go outside and see if you get wet. I’ve spent most of my career working with dozens of organizations that hired me to help them fix customer service. I haven’t been all that successful. Some areas in customer service are getting worse. I’ve written extensively about the matter but erroneously wrote to the people in charge of fixing customer service. I gave them blueprints, know-how, and shared everything I knew, to no avail. This time I’m writing to you, the customer—the one who votes with your wallet. I’ve had a 2 decade career in the customer service industry, and I’m going to share information about the industry that may make you uneasy. I’ll answer your burning questions and give you tips on how to get better service. I also plan to share a few radical ideas on what the future should look like.

      I suspect that many of my colleagues will not take my calls when I’m done, but I plan to lay it out bare nonetheless.

      One more possible outcome is that I may never get another job in this industry after this book is published, so please buy more than one copy if you can. Spread the Gospel. Join the Revolution at waitingforservice.com

      The Endless Waiting for Service

      BAD BY DESIGN

      Your customer service experience isn’t bad by accident. Most of it was intentionally built to be mediocre. There are many reasons for this but more on that later.

      On hold with AT&T for an hour, and still no resolution. 10 years of loyalty, and I feel more like a burden. I called to explain my issue and was on hold for 45 mins when the call dropped. Rinse and repeat! Time to find another carrier.

      I am starting with your ability to even reach customer service, or as I call it, the front gate. The most common complaint I hear about service is wait time. We all complain about long wait times over the phone or waiting for someone to respond on chat or email. This complaint is several decades old and seems to be getting worse. As I write this, the wait time for my internet broadband company was over 45 minutes on the phone yesterday, and I was 14th in line waiting on chat. I wrote while on hold and followed the race between telephone and chat. Telephone won out. I spoke with a young lady named Misty. She was polite but ultimately couldn’t help me, so she transferred me to someone else. I couldn’t see what she was doing on her end, but she must have sent me to the hang up on you department because that was what happened. I ended up getting service going through the back door, and I’ll be sharing tips to help you navigate this world of customer service till we make good service the norm.

      The average American will wait on hold for 43 days throughout a lifetime.

      Making you wait is profitable

      If you want to talk to a human being, it costs the company money to talk to you. There are two main drivers in that cost—wages and tech. More on the tech later, but the main reason you have any long wait times is that they don’t want to pay to shorten your wait time. To be fair, there are several reasons why they can’t or won’t pay to reduce your wait time, but it almost always comes down to money.

      The sun looked almost orange like it was mad at us. We were in the pacific northwest, and the temperature was 104, but my client insisted on having the meeting outdoors. I was there on their campus for one reason—to fix the customer experience. I’d be meeting with Terry one-on-one to preview the report of my findings before I shared it with the rest of the team.

      He wiped the sweat off his brow and asked, How bad is it? in his Texan drawl.

      I said, Do you want the bad news or the worse news?

      He was a bottom-line guy, so I skipped the preamble and flipped to the page with the key data. I said that, on average, his customers would want to wait 52 seconds when they called his store, but it was currently averaging 619 seconds. I then gave him three options, and this is where you, the consumer, need to pay attention.

      He could hire more people to respond to customers and lower the wait time, or he could use technology to reduce the wait time by moving customers towards options that wouldn’t require a person, or he could do a hybrid of both. Each of these three options has some cost associated with it, but the human option is always the most expensive.

      Terry leaned in and said, I think option 2 is a no-brainer. These are low-value inquiries; we just need to automate them. Or do you think I’m crazy?

      I made a mental calculation every person in my profession has made many times. Do I tell him the truth, or do I need another check from him?

      So I said, You’re not crazy, especially if your brand is all about low friction.

      I was trying to justify the decision we both knew was at best rushed, at worst plain wrong.

      How much more expensive? Consider that to even temporarily give his customers what they wanted would cost him an incremental 9 million dollars annually. So for him, that was a non-starter. This option is always a non-starter. In my 20 years of doing this, not one single client has ever taken this option. I rarely push this option. Most consultants don’t even explore the obvious answer. What you need to understand about consultants is that they are expensive, so if a company

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