You Loved Me When I Was A Prospect But Now…

A friend recently told me about their experience in refinancing their mortgage

When You’re A Prospect

with a large bank.

His story reminded me of a joke I once heard.

A man died and was at the gates of heaven.  St. Peter stood at the gate and asked him if he wanted to go to heaven or hell.  The man said, “Heaven, of course”. 

St. Peter told him that before he made a final decision, he could have a tour of both places.  The man agreed.

He got on an elevator and was soon greeted by Satan in Hell. The man was shocked! Satan was dressed in a tuxedo, drinking a martini and offered the man a drink.  He led him into a beautiful casino where everyone won every game.  Satan took him outside and showed him the gardens and the endless rounds of golf that could be played at the course there.

The man left and went back to St. Peter for his tour of Heaven.  It was very nice…beautiful music playing, quiet places to rest, peaceful and lovely.   He thought it was very pleasant, but nothing like the exciting fun times he had seen in Hell.

He told St. Peter, “I’ve made up my mind.  I’m going to go to Hell”.  He went into the elevator and descended to Hell.  When the doors opened and he stepped off, there was fire and brimstone and terrible things happening all around him.  He saw Satan and asked, “What happened to all the wonderful things you promised me when I was here earlier?”.

Satan replied, “Earlier you were a prospect…Now you’re customer!”

…..My friend’s experience had some similarities.

During his “Heavenly” prospect stage

The Loan Officer was so nice.  The lender called back, quickly responded to questions, promised that everything would be taken care of for him.  The bank was eager for his business.  The Loan Officer would even come to his work or home to discuss and help with documents. Given his financial situation, he was told the refinance should be a “piece of cake”.  My friend agreed to begin the process.

Then he entered Customer “Hell”

He never heard directly from the Loan Officer again.  He had filled out endless amounts of papers, signed documents and jumped through the financial hoops needed for the deal, despite being promised “easy” process.  The online process-tracking that customers could view on the bank website showed multiple errors: 15 documents still needed, although 12 of them had been mailed to the Loan Officer.  One document being requested was about child support or alimony received as income used in the qualifying even though he had told the Loan officer there was no such income.

He emailed the Loan Processor and was told that “everything was fine…don’t worry”.  A week later a threatening letter saying “you better send us these documents or else” arrived.

My friend had had enough.  He emailed the bank parties involved and wrote that he was ready to cancel everything.  Within minutes of sending the email, he received a call from the processor apologizing. Suddenly there was great service and smiles from all involved. The website information was correctly updated and initial approval for the loan was received.

The bank was lucky that my friend was willing to give them the chance to fix things. It’s too easy for our customers to move on and look for someone else who will treat them well both as a prospect and when they are a customer.

Ask your sales and service teams…Are we making our customers feel valued or just focused on bringing in the new business?

Consistency and Simplicity Help Drive Customer Experience

YOUR CUSTOMERS?                               (Photo: Wikipedia)

I recently facilitated an Employee Feedback meeting for a client.  Our discussion focused on employee observations related to Customer Experience.  The feedback group included contact center agents, retail store employees and technicians.  When I asked them if customers were receiving the best quality service during customer interactions, they unanimously said “no”.

I was a bit surprised at the emphatic response from everyone and asked why each felt that way.  The top responses given were lack of consistency, hit or miss training and poorly designed web self-service.

The employees said that customers received conflicting, wrong and often confusing information both in personal interactions and when using the company website.  Customers called or complained to store employees and installers that they couldn’t find answers or navigate the website pages without getting lost.  I asked for examples of these poor customer experiences.

One employee spoke about a customer who had been given wrong billing information by someone at a Retail store which then caused the same customer to call the contact center to complain.   She said it was clear from the customer notes that the retail employee had not been effectively trained on the new billing changes.    The agent then had to apologize and calm down an irate customer.

Wasted time for the customer.

 Unnecessary call into the center driving up wait times.

Another employee shared examples of calls from customers who told him that the website was hard to navigate through. Clicks led to dead ends or forced them to have to call instead of allowing them do it themselves online.  Simple changes like Password updates were impossible to do.  Customers said they spent more time trying to find the answer than if they had just picked up the phone.

More unhappy customers,

 More calls in queue.

When I asked the employees what had occurred when they shared these stories with their leadership, they told me that in most cases, the supervisors had simply sent out an email reminding everyone to make sure they give “accurate” information.  The leadership also referred employees to the company internal Knowledge Base, which itself had some old or conflicting information from what the group said. In other words, nothing had changed to improve these Customer Experience issues.

In all of these cases, the employees, who may have had every intention of providing a wonderful Customer Experience, have instead been set up to fail because the company had not done everything possible to eliminate inconsistencies and poor self-service procedures.

Employees spent most of their time apologizing and listening to complaints about poor systems, antiquated knowledge bases and web navigations going in circles.

We can’t hold Employees accountable if we do not take the steps necessary to set them up for success instead of failure.  We cannot create a great Customer Experience if we aren’t focused on eliminating the communication inconsistencies, the knowledge base roadblocks and the added work we are creating for our customers in person, with our contact center and during online interactions.

Keep things simple to do and consistent. Customers will love you for it!

♦ NOTE:  My post originally appeared on the WalkMe.com blog.  A big thank you to Stefanie Amini there!

Guest Blog: 3 Ways to Create a Positive Self-Service Customer Experience

Today I’m featuring another Guest Blogger who provides us with some tips on successful self-service.  Stefanie Amini is the Marketing Director and Specialist in Customer Success at WalkMe, the world’s first interactive online guidance system.  She is chief writer and editor of  IWant It Now, a blog for Customer Service Experts. Follow her @StefWalkMe

3 Ways to Create a Positive Self-Service Customer Experience

by Stefanie Amini, Marketing Director, WalkMe

How many times have called a company to reach their customer service team and gone around in circles waiting for the right option to come your way?  Then, when you finally find the right option, it still isn’t what you wanted.  So, what do you and most customers do?  Press 0… and then 0… and then 0-0-0-0, until you get through to a real person.

By the time customers in this scenario reach the rep,  they are irritated at the rep, as well as frustrated and angry at the company too.  This potential negative effect can spread like wild-fire.  When a customer is unhappy, they will tell 10 people as studies demonstrate.

Your phone menus and options may be designed to encourage customers to get the right help to avoid this bad customer experience, and have some sort of way out of the endless queue circle techniques, but does your website have it too?

Web menus often consist of FAQ pages, guidance documents, tutorial videos and live chat that attempt to direct the customer to the help they need in a web efficient manner.  This doesn’t necessarily guarantee they will get the right help they need – it can potentially lead to dead-end pages that result in frustration.  The usual customer web-user wants to find what they need in just three clicks.

If they haven’t found what they need in three clicks, it’s over and they may be looking at your competitor’s site next.

Finding tools and managing customer service through the web in order to make sure the customer gets the right information, allows customers to positively engage the site in minimal time.  Allowing customers to self-service can lower costs and make the customer feel in control.  Self-service adoption can also increase the brand’s power for the customer.

There are ways that you can help create a positive experience within your self-service options:

1. Create clear messaging and guidance in your websites menu – Do some market research, and even some focus groups to understand what the customer needs, and how they are asking the questions.  It will also help with your SEO efforts.
2. Clear menu on the call- Make sure the customer is getting clear and easy guidance to get the support they need. I spoke to a customer representative recently who was with a satellite TV company based in the US.  He said that they have an option on their phone menu that customers can select for different languages, however, they don’t have a team of people who receive from the different language route and can communicate in the chosen language. The rep can only offer that someone will call them back to assist.  Both parties are frustrated and this drives additional outbound calls as well as a bad customer experience.
3. Take a moment to look at your website menu navigation from the eyes of the customer

• Is it easy to use?
• Are you reaching dead ends?
• Does the flow of your website make sense or is it full of jargon that just leads to more user confusion?

These questions are factors that you must consider and can affect (or differentiate between) the creation of a frustrated user or a pleased one.

The bottom line:  Make sure to keep your self-service, whether in your phone menus or on your website, focused on making the customer happy and keeping the messages and direction for use clear and simple.

 

 

I’m Guest Blogging on Deluxe Knowledge Exchange this month!

The Deluxe Knowledge Exchange^SM is an ongoing complimentary online resource designed to help banks and credit unions work together to find solutions to shared business challenges.

The title is: ” Processes that Create Work for Our Customers” and focuses on how financial institution processes can undermine Customer Experience.

My blog post on their site is HERE

Do Your Emails Just Generate Calls to Process First Agents?

I recently received a strange Email from my Bank regarding my credit card. The kind of Email you love to receive because you have no idea what it means and now you’re going to have to pick up the phone and make a call. I hate waiting in queue so I’m not much different from most of our Customers.

The email also had a lovely added twist for my confusion.  In essence it said  (not exact wording):  “Surprise!  we’ve moved your old card stuff to a new card.”  So now I’m wondering, Identity theft?  Lost card?  I quickly checked and still had my card, so one fear off the list.

Before calling, I went to my online account to see what my information said.  Sure enough, there is a new credit card number and recent purchases from the old card are there. But wait..for security reasons, there are only the last 4 digits of the new card visible.

What is the new number? Why do I have this number? What does it all mean?  I feel trapped in one of those old Sunday Night Mystery movies without Columbo to help me. 

The fun continues when I call the 800 service line and reach one of most non-empathetic Agents I’ve ever had the pleasure of speaking with.  I explained the email I received and my concerns.  The first thing she does is begin her Process steps.  As you may know from my other posts, my mantra is “Empathy first, process second.” Needless to say and yet I must say it, my Moment of Truth is not a good one at this point.

The Agent asks me to verify the new account number I’m calling about.  I tell her that I only know the last 4 numbers. She says, “Since you said you were online, your number will appear to the left of your account”. Now we have a problem.  She doesn’t know that other accounts have the entire number visible but the credit cards only show the last 4 numbers. She may love her processes but she obviously needs training on the online screens. Another Moment of Truth…wrong information given.

I explained again that I could not see the number and repeated that I was not only calling to find out what it was, but also why I no longer had my old account.  She finally told me after more probing that while it appeared that my account had not been compromised, a percentage of customers who had shopped at (blank) store, as I had, had issues with their cards so accounts were closed and then reopened with new numbers.  I asked her when this had happened.  She replied that she didn’t know.

I had to ask every question I could think of because she did not offer any further information.  Finally, she told me that I would receive a new card in 7 to 10 days. Yet another Moment of Truth downhill slide for me.

“What?  First you people (yes, I love that standard angry customer phrase too!) move me to a new credit card number and now you can’t expedite the card for me?”  She replied that it was already in Process (she really did love her process) and I would just have to wait.  She could give me the new number over the phone due to the waiting time but not the security code on it. She added that she could do nothing else to help.

No apology.  No empathy. No interest in me.

“Why yes…I’d like to take your customer survey at the end of the call.”

It all started with an email….

Processes That Create Work for Our Customers

Image via Wikipedia

Recently, my friend, “Sue”,  told me about a situation which occurred regarding her Flood Insurance with Auto-Owners (www.auto-owners.com).  Sue received the insurance  bill and dutifully paid the amount to Auto-Owners prior to the due date, in fact 2 weeks prior to “get it off of her desk”, she said.

About a week after payment was made, Sue received a letter in the mail from her mortgage company telling her that they had received a bill from Auto-Owners for that same Flood Insurance she had just paid for in full.  The letter went on to say that they (the mortgage company) did not have an escrow in place to pay this amount directly to Auto-Owners and that she needed to contact Auto-Owners or her insurance agent to arrange for payment directly to the insurance company.

Sue contacted her Agent as they suggested and was told to “ignore the letter” from the Mortgage company.  The Agent added, “I know it’s confusing but Auto-Owners always bills both parties.  That’s just the way they do business”  When Sue said she had already paid Auto-Owners in advance and the check had cleared prior to receiving the letter the Agent said, “Well, everything is automated so it was already scheduled when you had paid. Guess there wasn’t a way to stop it from mailing out”.  Sue suggested that the Agent report to Auto-Owners that this process was a poor one, and the Agent replied, “It won’t do any good.  It’s just the way they do business and they won’t change it.  I’ve asked about it before for other Customers and was told that is the way it is done”.

When my friend relayed this story to me, I thought it was a perfect example of how to create a poor Customer Experience because your processes aren’t focused on making good Customers feel valued, while still operating effectively and efficiently.  There were so many lost opportunities.

1. Because of the Auto-Owners double billing method, the mortgage company now has created their own process for sending an auto-generated letter that goes out regarding the bill mistakenly sent to them. How much does this cost the mortgage company?  Should the mortgage company be sent a notice of “non-payment” of the Flood Insurance only after the due date has past?

2. The Customer had to take the time (after paying early) to re-check that the payment was cleared, call her Insurance Agent to verify, wait for the Agent to respond and had almost called the Mortgage company as well until the Agent told her it was unnecessary.  How much time did this Customer spend trying to take care of what apparently was not a problem at all?

3. Early payment might instead have resulted in a nice email to Customers saying we appreciate your business.  Your company can apparently set up confusing letters to auto-generate but can’t send out ones to make good Customers feel valued?

4. When Customers are complaining about your processes but you continue to do the same thing, what is your focus:  great Customer Service or meeting some internal metric created by the bean counters?  Can’t you have great Service AND revenue generating/ efficiency processes combined?

Maybe it’s time for Auto-Owners to have a Focus Group with Customers to ask them how they feel about this process and others they may have issues with.  Or, maybe as Sue’s Insurance Agent said, Auto-Owners has been given feedback about it but just choose to go about “business as usual”.