The advent of the mobile phone has subjected all users to the scourge of the unwanted sales call, which the Do Not Call directory has not diminished. But what about those annoying calls from a service provider?
I call this conundrum the “over-service” problem. It differs from random sales calls by companies soliciting your custom in that it is disguised as “customer service” to clients who are locked in to them one way or another. Such calls are a means of getting around the “do not contact for special offers” option that customers may sign up for.
For instance, the WorldSpace satellite radio service has one of the most conscientious back-office staff I know. Various members from this outfit have called me no less than six times to remind me — in early September — that my subscription will expire in November.
At first, I was touched at this early reminder, until it became clear that this concern was bundled with an offer — I would get two months free if I subscribed right now. I turned down the offer several times, explaining that I have an old-fashioned reservation about revealing a credit card number to an unseen service provider on the phone (a quick read of Other People’s Money, a rivetting confession by an international fraudster, will explain why).
Despite these conversations, WorldSpace continues to bombard me with SMSs about the offer. Finally, after the sixth call, the penny dropped. Could they then send someone to physically collect the cheque, asked the persistent lady at the other end.
WorldSpace’s inability to take no for an answer is easy to understand. The company is in financial trouble. It made losses of $36 million in the second quarter of 2008 on revenues of $3.3 million and is heavily leveraged.
Although I hugely enjoy its ad-free 24-hour music service and would like it to survive, WorldSpace’s business model obviously needs critical mass to make it work, especially when it has to compete with free downloads from a whole host of music sites with rich choices. So the assiduous attention to subscriptions and renewals is understandable from a corporate point of view. Customers need to be locked in early to generate cash flows to keep the business running.
As a customer retention tool, though, this strategy sucks. If the service were not tied to the hardware, I would not bother to renew the subscription — not because I don’t like the service but out of sheer exasperation with its back office staff.
No doubt, WorldSpace also focuses on service efficiency — and till recently it has not disappointed on this score. But a month earlier, its oh-so-attentive back-office neglected to inform me when its systems were being refreshed and accessing the service required a fresh password (of 22 letters, no less). This simple service would not, after all, generate any potential cash.
Banks and mobile and DTH service providers are no less troublesome. The back office staff of the DTH service provider to which I subscribe regularly calls to feverishly rattle off various extras they’d like me to buy. But the simple task of subscribing to a new package is time-consuming and irritating and calls to customer service routinely require long waits.
To date, my bank has not been able to help me on an inter-bank transfer. The “relationship officer” who visits the office appears to hold hectic phone conversations every time I approach. The three times I asked a back office staffer to help have ended in failure — twice I was asked to hold and then cut off, and the third time I was told my Net connection was probably too slow.
Yet, this same bank has called four times in ten days to press on me a credit card and something called a “sweep facility” — which apparently involves skimming off a portion of my monthly income into a high-earning fixed deposit scheme. Each call is always prefaced with solicitous enquiries about their service.
Like WorldSpace, my banker can’t take no for an answer, no matter how truculently expressed, giving “customer focus” a whole new meaning.
The trouble seems to be that companies are responding to acute competition the wrong way. Instead of doing the simple things efficiently, they focus on adding the bells and whistles that they hope (mistakenly) will differentiate them from the others. When corporate strategy conflicts with customer experience, most service providers end up with clientele who are indifferent and unlikely to be loyal. Over-service, in other words, can be a source of inefficiency too.
The real Mou-da
My previous column (September 4) had incorrectly identified Jyoti Basu as “Mou-da”. The nickname was actually given to Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee, who, as Chairman of the West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation in the mid nineties, developed a reputation for signing MoUs that came to nothing.
