Irony: Customer Service and Telecoms

Telecommunication has the word communication in it and yet it leads the charts, for the third straight year, as the worst industry for customer support. And what’s more, other companies have been improving their customer satisfaction scores… telecoms haven’t. In fact, many are getting worse.

In the bottom 5 for customer support, four are telecommunication companies. Let’s take AOL for instance. 44.8% poor rating. Even Walmart, a store noted for its poor customer service, did stunningly well in comparison and even increased their satisfaction index.

But let us face facts, the above is misleading. How can a telecom call center staffed by 100 or so people compete with a company that has 5-20 reps per store and roughly 7,000  stores worldwide. Its really not possible. For one both get a lot of customer support volume, but Walmart has is spaced across thousands of locations and people, while telecom call centers basically funnel all the customer problems to a few hundred (and that’s being overly generous). Most of Walmart’s customer support is handled face to face as well and people are less likely to be confrontational in that situation. Where as over the phone or in an email you can be as abusive as your heart desires.

Although we cannot compare (or I should say should not compare since we can compare them all day if we want biased information) a face to face customer experience to an over the phone one, the telecom industry’s support is still pretty poor.

A great deal of people blame this sort of thing on outsourcing and I disagree. I don’t think outsourcing is the main problem behind poor customer service in many industries. I think the problem comes from not be able to gauge a proper ROI for customer support.

We all know you need customer support and we all know that all things being equal great customer support builds loyalty. The problem is we don’t know how much loyalty you get from each dollar invested in customer support. If a business who is faced with a shrinking budget has to choose between putting their money into something like customer support (we know its needed, but have no idea how much is needed) or something like security (to ensure they have a product to sell in the first place), the money will go to security.

The average business will also choose volume over quality. Volume gives tangible results. We spend several thousand in advertising we see the amount we sell go up. By the same token we spend several thousand in customer support, you really don’t see anything.

Personally, I think the best way to solve the customer support issue is for someone to really show the ranges you get with investments and to put customer support in analytical terms for our industry (web hosting and everything associated with it, telecoms for example). The problem of course is that on the surface, customer support is a wholly subjective field, but I think with a little work in can be quantified. Until then, we will continue to see low customer support rankings.