The first of the "Big Boys" have ditched live customer support
Used to be that when you needed the customer service department of a company to solve a problem, you simply picked up the phone and talked to a real, live person. That soon shifted to fist having to work your way through phone trees more complicated than the schematics of the International Space Station only to get to a trained human robot miles away in some remote location in the world doing their best to emulate your accent.
Sick of the process? As a customer I’d say most of us are so initially the the idea that Wal-Mart would do away with all that seemed appealing. Except…….Wall-Mart is so committed to making sure we don’t have issues with dial-in customer service, they’ve removed the option entirely as part of their new "Customer Contact Reduction Program." And No, that name is not a joke.
That’s the actual name of the program, according to the New York Times.That’s right, if you need to reach customer service as part of your Wal-Mart shopping experience, you’ll need to use the keyboard of your computer, not the keypad on your phone.
"We’ve made a significant investment in the enhancement of our online customer "self-help" tool at Walmart.com to better serve our online customers," said Amy Colella, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman.
Ms. Colella said the customer service phone number was being removed because "a significant number of calls are related to order tracking," and the improvements to the Web site will make the tracking easier."
Now e-support is my job and getting as many customers off the phone and to HP’s "e" tools is my goal.
But this is really a symptom of a larger problem. The Internet is a wonderful way for customers and businesses to interact.
A well-designed Web site should have the answers to most customer service questions, or the tools needed to find them (order status, shipment tracker, etc.).
But of course, there will always be people who can’t find what they need — and, yes, also the ones that even won’t try — and they’ll need to phone in with their issue. Let’s face it in some of our markets most customers probably do not even have access to the internet.
But for a retail chain one would expect that serving customers during the entire purchasing process, not just up to the point where you take their money, is what their business is all about.
Most companies still provide (even if somewhat reluctantly, by burying it in an unobvious spot) a phone number for customers to use. (Note HP actually does a pretty great job here….Contact HP pages are part of every single hp.com page). Of course real-life customer service reps even if off-shore aren’t nearly as cost-effective as e-support but if a behemoth like Wal-Mart won’t spring for the extra to let us talk to a human, is there any hope that smaller companies won’t follow suit and yank phone numbers off their Web sites too?
Then of course there are some additional challenges. Ever needed to call your ISP to report your connection is down and been greeted with a recording to "use the troubleshooting tools on the Web site first?" . How do you check a website if your connection is exactly what your problem is in the first place. Or the electric company that urges you to report power outages using the "handy form on the Web site."
As more and more companies take their business online, it’s troubling to see a decreased emphasis on good customer care, and disappointing to see some hide behind computers outright instead of interacting with the very customers they’re trying to lure
or by at the very least giving the customer a choice.
Should real live customer contact always be a part of any great customer service equation? I guess that is a question we in HP need to be debating as well. For some products I’d venture the answer is probably yes. For others, we may enter a news era sometime soon.
However an overall program called "Customer Contact Reduction" could be a very bad idea — it might generate the kind of reduction in customer contact that translates into a reduction in customers. You know what they say: Be careful what you wish for…..
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