Customer Service - BT this time.

I've had a fantastic week of customer service rounded off nicely by BT.

Currently setting up BT Business Broadband at home on a new phone line. There were some issues at the exchange which prevented them from activating the ADSL straight away. I received this text message on Friday, twice.

BT Business Broadband Order xxxxxxx Please contact us regarding your order on 08002346553, access PIN xxx by 09/10/07 to prevent the order being cancelled

Cancelled! What was going on?

I phoned the number and the lady at the call centre told me it was just the standard message and nothing to worry about. They just wanted to tell me that the ADSL would be enabled on the 11th October.

So plus marks to BT for using SMS to keep me updated about the order. Minus marks for:

1. Sending it too me twice
2. Using a standard template which made me think there was a problem
3. Not using the text message to tell me the information and save me a call

Time and time again companies implement customer service systems with apparently little thought to the implementation. Julian had a similarly frustrating experience with the Easyjet SMS updates : EasyJetText Alerts from StreamThru - First Encounter.

Frustratingly it seems that companies feel they just have to deliver some, any, information via SMS and they've ticked off that feature. It's a different channel with it's own vagaries that must be respected if these features are to be useful.

The good news is that when I got home, the broadband was already live.

The franchise approach and the dangers of not being in control

Had an joyful customer service experience from a couple of franchise operations today that, as well as infuriating me, are very relevant to a book I'm reading at the moment. E-myth Revisited by Michael Gerber, has as it's central tenet that to make truly successful business one should view it as a franchise prototype.

His view is that if you build the business as if you're going to replicate it, even if you have no plans to franchise, then it will make the business able to operate without the involvement of the principal and therefore be far stronger.

Being a 'new man' of the nineties, I can share with you that I was shopping for face wash. My wife convinced me to try several varieties and the one I settled on, ie it didn't feel like several layers of skin had been stripped from my face, was from Clarins. So off I went to the local franchise at Debenhams in the city centre.

No one was behind the counter. Eventually someone arrived, she proceeded to tell me she was dealing with another customer, it wasn't her stall and that anyway the other person was at lunch. Needless to say I didn't stick around.

Off to the John Lewis franchise next and a totally different experience. Someone was there, in fact someone came over from a different franchise to help me because another customer was being dealt with.

I noticed that they had a 30ml version of the wash in a travel pack so I asked about buying one of those separately. Annoyingly the standard size is 125ml so too big to take in hand luggage on a plane currently. They couldn't sell me one but did find me several testers for my next trip.

So confidence restored, but it could so easily have not been. What if I had been a new customer, recommended to try out their products, or buying something for a friend? A customer lost, the Clarins brand tarnished.

One of the things we pride ourselves on at Esendex, and something we receive plaudits for, is the quality of our customer service. It's going to be one of the key challenges we face as we continue our rapid growth.

Back to the book, it's a good easy read but I've only just started the section on how you do it. Will let you know.

Proactive Customer Service - Remember the miss-spellings

Just realised that I didn't have 'Essendex' as a search term in Google Alerts. It's a miss-spelling we didn't foresee when we came up with the name but it's turned out to be common. A lesson learned.

Pro-active Customer Service - Our Turn

I posted a while ago in Keeping your ear to the ground about searching the web for references to Esendex that might indicate someone having an issue.

I've got Google Alerts set up to track terms like 'Esendex Issue', 'Esendex Problem' and 'Esendex Delay'. One finally appeared.

KS-Soft :: View topic - Email relay problem.

Now the posts were from April last year but one of my support team went ahead and posted a reply anyway. Loh and behold the postee came straight back, happy. They were trialing at the time and had subsequently signed up as a customer.

I'm hoping that we're on top of it now and can react more quickly than over a year. If the customer hadn't been happy, they'd have been off and we'd never have known why.

Keeping your ear to the ground

My experiences with SpinVox pro-actively contacting me got me thinking about customer service in the UGC (user generated content) era.

I often find myself searching the web for references to Esendex, obstensibly for web marketing purposes but really because I'm a little obsessed. Occasionally I'll come across a posting from someone and I'll help them out of let the relevant person in the company know so they can help them.

The leap for me tonight was that this should be someone's job. On a regular basis a member of our customer services team should be browsing the web, searching for issues that we can resolve proactively.

Now fortunately my intial searching didn't come up with any problems. I did come across this forum thread SMS Gateway Dilema which is a fascinating insight into the decision process that someone goes through when signing up for a service like ours. I was on the edge of my seat, we got down to the last three but there is no indication of who they went for. I'll see if our Melbourne office and let you know.

You hear about big companies striving to understand and harness UGC, but actually it's relevant to anyone running a business today. Ignore it at your peril.

SpinVox, nice bit of pro-active customer service

I blogged recently, SpinVox, I love it but, about the highs and occasional lows of using the SpinVox voicemail to text service. Well the guys at SpinVox are obviously perusing the blogosphere and decided to drop me a line.

Hi Adam, thanks for writing about SpinVox. I'm sorry to hear about the occasional delays you've been experiencing and I'd naturally like to look into this - as this is not the norm for SpinVox customers. Our average time delay is 3-5mins - so there must be something else affecting this?

If you can give me some more information on the messages that have been delayed, it would really help us look into this.

spinx@spinvox.com

So I've sent an example and will keep you posted.

It must be said that there haven't been any noticeable delays since I blogged. All messages have been delivered within the thresholds quoted.