If there is a single trend at the end of this decade that is important to programmers, it must be the increasing importance of IT (information technology) to the functioning of business. Any company that deals with customers via sophisticated technology, such as web pages and computer telephony, had better treat IT as something more than a bunch of strange people who come in and run backups on the weekend. And yet we still see companies fumbling badly with IT when it comes to customer service. Either they lean too heavily on resources like email, without providing adequate technical support, or they don't lean heavily enough. From a customer's perspective, the result is often worse than no IT at all.
What follows are a few examples. I take the liberty, in this month of April fools, to write about some foolishness not directly related to programming. However, this is not exactly an April Fool's column. That is, I am not kidding or making any of this up. (And in case you were wondering, none of the articles in this issue are a joke.) I have experienced each of the following "customer reduction" measures first-hand, and I can testify to their effectiveness. I call this list, "How to Get Your Customers Boiling Mad Without Really Trying:"
- If your company has a voice-mail system, collect as much information from customers as possible before handing them off to a human being. Make them type in account numbers, phone numbers — anything you can think of — via telephone keypad. Then, of course, do not make this information available at the customer service rep's computer. That's right, make customers repeat all of it. First impressions may hint at your ineptness; repetition will drive the point home.
- Make it virtually impossible to reach the same customer-service rep twice in a row. Put incoming calls on a kind of random shuffle, and rely solely on the company's database to preserve continuity. This is actually what my health insurance company does. Imagine how endearing it is to be asked, "So what was your special medical problem again? The previous associate didn't record anything in the notes field..."
- If the shipping department encounters a problem filling a rush order, under no circumstances should someone pick up the phone and alert the customer's account rep. Instead, all inter-departmental communication should be via email. Email is more high-tech, so we know it must be better. And now your account rep has an excuse (however lame) for sitting on rush orders: the server went down, I was on vacation and couldn't figure out how to redirect my email, etc.
- Teach your customer-service people to say things like, "I'm sorry, sir, the computer won't let me do that." Those darned IT people! First they give us the Y2K problem, then they program our computers so they can't do anything. If you're lucky, your customers won't figure out that the real problem is I(nadequate) T(raining), not IT.
I realize that most readers of this magazine are programmers, not managers. As a programmer, you may have little involvement with customer service — and perhaps you'd like to keep it that way. But for goodness sake, if you see your company doing boneheaded things like the above, please educate your managers about the possibilities and limitations of IT. In the long run, you'll be doing yourself a favor. The next voice-mail system that puts you on random shuffle may be your own.
Marc Briand
Editor-in-Chief