I had the fun experience of having to call Citibank this evening to moan that I couldn’t set up an online payment. Their website was rejecting the sort code of the account I was trying to send a payment to, even though I have the recipient’s checkbook in front of me, and know it is correct.
Their splendid new IVR system allows you to do voice recognition.
You have no idea how much fun it is trying to navigate this system with two over-excited screamy kids in the background.
“For an account representative, say ‘representative’”“Daddy, Daddy, she took it off me!”
“Thank you, please select a bill payee”
“Kids, BE QUIET! I’m on the telephone”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t recognise that payee, please try again”
Somehow, I don’t think this is a technology that’s quite reached the maturity level needed…
Anyhow, I’m about to write a report on the call centre of the future, so a few things of note.
Firstly, there was zero integration of the web and telephone experience. You get a popup saying “this sort code is not valid”, and that’s it. If you’ve got an objection to their exception, you have to start again via another channel, with all the 16 digit numbers and PINs and announcements about lost or stolen cards. It’s when things go wrong that customer loyalty is established — or destroyed.
The next thing was a more philosophical problem that seems to afflict contact centres, which is “the customer is always wrong”. Sadly, Citibank doesn’t seem capable of maintaining a list of valid UK sort codes. Empower your employees to correct these mistakes — for example by being able to override exceptions or wonky business rules. Otherwise, the customer gets mad. And you never get to find which business rules are bunk.
In telcoland, the fiendish complexity of tariffs, combined with the IT madness of bundling, guarantees a nightmare for customers. Combine that with disempowered care representatives, and an attitude of “the computer says ‘no’”, you’ve got a lot of churn. How come telcos can’t eat their own dogfood here? We sell voice, messaging, and web access — just don’t ask us to use them together… This contrasts with my experience last night with emusic.com, where I could quickly have an IM session with customer support.
I can imagine how the web browser could be re-engineered to support a two-sided market here. Would Citibank be willing to pay Google (yeah, I’m hooked on Chrome) to set up a voice call to my landline/nearest phone, and to share what’s on my screen in a highly secure manner? Possibly, yes. Sadly, few people think about how their communications products can be re-engineered to facilitate B2C interactions. Check out a few of my old ideas on Skype to see where I think they screwed up here.
Another example of how silly business rules lose customers: I phoned T-Mobile to ask if they’d do me a good deal on a voice plan with mobile broadband. Apparently as I’m a SIM-only postpaid user, who merely sends them about £50 (US$90) every month, and never has asked for a subsidised handset, I don’t qualify. No problem, 3UK were more than happy to accept my business. What if, instead, the rep was empowered to judge my customer lifetime value, and place his bets accordingly? A year later, his bonus would be based on my profitability as a customer given the deal he offered me.
This all reminds me of the battles between cost accounting and throughput accounting, which underpins lean production ideology. Cost accounting focuses on all kinds of intermediate stuff, with various made-up and backwards-looking numbers. Throughput accounting discards most of the numbers managers typically rely on, and only cares about what really matters — which is value to the end customer. Any contact centre that measures things like “time per call” is immersed in this cost accounting madness.
So today I got angry when the agent at the other end followed the script and told me to contact the other bank to check the sort code was valid. Those who know me can tell you that it takes a lot to turn everyday placid Martin into mad Martin. Indeed, I’m sorry to have to report that — for the first time ever — I lost my cool with some poor lady in an Indian call centre. If she was incentivised to retain my custom, I suspect the word ‘sorry’ might have entered her head. Instead, she stuck to the script.
So as a simple money transfer is beyond Citibank’s capability, my closing words of “no, I’ll take my banking business elsewhere” will be turned into action. I’m terrible at choosing banks — my business bank, The Co-operative Bank, is utterly hopeless. So if anyone can recommend a solvent, competent UK retail bank (assuming such an entity exists) do let me know!
UPDATE: Ooh! A nice, apologetic man from Citibank has given me a call. You know, all you have to do is treat the customer as a human, and not a moron. The sort code problem is not theirs (or mine — blame Nationwide Building Society), but the customer care problem is.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 07:02 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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So much wrong, so much to do. :) How simple to just go "too much noise - go to DTMF"; your sort code issue just needed to know who you were at the end of the day, so we are back to your issue of deep authentication; aaaaand when something is going wrong with the process, stop, and go to a live agent. Oh and did I mention that you should be able to do all that with a pop up click-2-call, with the context of your forwarded as a "call whisper", i.e. the information gets forwarded to the call centre, from the screen session, so that you don't have to go all over that again. This stuff is here today, I know, our company does it. But there is so much more that can be done by thinking more about how online and offline will mesh together.
Posted by: at September 21, 2008 11:28 PMAt least you don't live in Holland. Read this for a laugh, and a cry (too long to repost):
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/25.34.html#subj7