The doctor is in! 3 customer service suggestions for BT
Our BT broadband failed the other week, for the second time in the space of a few months. I wasn’t happy. But it gave me the opportunity to get a real-world BT customer experience. And it wasn’t great.
However, I have come up with three practical observations and tips for BT – and indeed any of us responsible for customer service and fault rectification. All three should be very easy to implement. They don’t need a radical overhaul of how BT manages its customer service operation or their underlying technologies (both of which are no doubt complex and hard to improve). It’s just a matter of thinking about how they use their current solutions and techniques.
Our BT broadband failed the other week, for the second time in the space of a few months. I wasn’t happy. But it gave me the opportunity to get a real-world BT customer experience. And it wasn’t great.
However, I have come up with three practical observations and tips for BT – and indeed any of us responsible for customer service and fault rectification. All three should be very easy to implement. They don’t need a radical overhaul of how BT manages its customer service operation or their underlying technologies (both of which are no doubt complex and hard to improve). It’s just a matter of thinking about how they use their current solutions and techniques.
1. Busting Queues* or Boosting Frustration?
The ability to let customers know how long they are likely to have to queue and to allow them to select an automatic call back is a real ‘win-win’. It improves the customer experience and allows the organisation to better manage its workload and service levels – especially when, like BT Broadband, they have high average queue times across channels.
However, it only works if you meet the promised call back time. I was promised a call back ‘within an hour’ and I’m still waiting. So, due to problems with its set-up and / or operation, a smart solution instead merely serves to increase customer frustration.
Don’t raise expectations if you can’t deliver them!
* I gather BT use Contact Solutions‘ QueueBuster tool. QueueBuster has a good reputation, so I assume what I’ve experienced is a problem in BT’s implementation and operation
2. Web-chat – Identifying and Forgetting
A bane of many customer service organisations – especially those perceived to deliver deficient service – is the need to correctly capture and verify the identity of customers when they just want to get their problem fixed. BT’s web-chat solution, which requires customers to log themselves in with key account details prior to starting a chat, should help with this. Moreover, customers access the web-chat service via the BT website to which they have already had to log in.
However, every time a chat is presented to a customer service agent they then proceed to ask for all the same information again, without even acknowledging that it has already been provided – thus guaranteeing more customer frustration.
(As an aside, queueing for chat for 25 minutes, being assessed and ‘transferred’ to another web-chat team – which necessitates a further 20 minute queue – wasn’t a great experience, either).
3. Anti-Social Media
BT staff managing the @BTCare twitter account do a great job of giving BT customer service a ‘human face’, but they don’t have the tools to resolve customers’ concerns. For instance, sending customers a link to start a web-chat is great, but if that link is to the standard BT website page, full of ‘contact avoidance’ messages – rather than a link to start a chat directly (ideally one that tags the customer as having been in communication with the Social team) – then yet again it’s a disjointed process that serves to frustrate already unhappy customers.
Cross-channel ‘care’ is no substitute for cross-channel service and problem resolution.
My broadband’s up and running again, now. I’m in no great hurry to put BT Broadband’s customer service to the test, but with a little thought and some technical adjustments they could make the experience for other disappointed customers that little bit better.
