Why do we take all that crap?
4 October 2007Today is “double rant day” as I wished to express my un-happiness once again. This may not be as bad as some other people but still pretty annoying.
Bad monitor
It all started about 2 weeks ago when my 20″ Benq LCD broke. I was pretty annoyed as I paid big bucks back then and half of the screen would go blank at any time. I like to use 100% of my screen, not just 50% of it.
Luckily the warranty was still valid so I called the help desk (BTW, I’ll cut the usual “did you check your cable?” stuff as you know what I’m talking about) and managed to find a local drop off location in Montreal. That’s neat as I didn’t have the original box (who does after more than 2 years?!?). I nicely explained the guy that my monitor suffered from an IN-TER-MIT-TENT issue and translated it in baby language for him by telling him not to simply hook it for 5 minutes but rather to use it as his own monitor. “You can’t miss it” I told him. I even printed out a picture that I took with my digital camera. “Kapish?” I asked. So I left, thinking that I did a great job explaining the problem and felt better about giving the guy extra customer support tips. “We’ll call you in a week” he said as I left. Great! I thought, now it’s time to get that CRT from the garage - always handy…
A week or so later, I get a voice mail saying that they couldn’t see any problem and they would ship the monitor back. I was like “aaahhh (censored) what is this?!” Then, I noticed a second message which said that they hooked my monitor and noticed the problems immediately. What..?! What did you guy do all that time? The message also said that they needed to order a part and it will take a few more days. Ok, I can handle this. I’m a patient guy…
Next thing I know, I get a FedEx sticker on my door, then a second the next day (as I work and no, I am not home between 9AM to 5PM). I found it odd as I didn’t order anything. I called Benq and asked for a status report: part still not received, it should take a couple of extra days. Hmm ok.. So I called FedEx and ask them about the package. Hey guess what! It’s from Benq. Nice communication. Finally went home and called FedEx around 7pm to see if they could come to my house after 5PM (as I have a life during their regular work hours). I had to wait 28 minutes to speak to someone. 28 minutes! Good thing I was using a speakerphone and had something else to do. Spoke to them and, of course, no can do… they only deliver during regular business hours and I have to pick it up within 7 days or it will be shipped back. Nice. All right, so let’s go and pick it up. Oh wait, they are not in Dorval as someone would expect (you know, that would be close to the airport – which they probably use a lot). Not even in Montreal. But in frickin’ St-Hubert. So those who don’t know St-Hubert, well it takes more than 30 minutes (without traffic) just to go there. Great…! Good thing I have a car. What if I didn’t like a lot of Montrealers?
Got there, saw the box and it felt like their semi-truck stepped over it a couple of times. It was in a pretty bad condition and I almost refused the shipment. I opened the box over there and fortunately, there were no scratches (really, I am still amazed about that). I hooked it up over there and noticed the “splash screen”. I didn’t see any dead pixels so I took a chance and took it home with me.
Got home and…. guess what? The DVI port doesn’t work. Got to start this crap over once more…!
Canceling a credit card
I decided to cancel my HBC card recently since I only used it to get 10% off a xmas gift (and an extra 10$ off). I totally forgot about that card but was reminded by smail (spam mail). I never use store credit cards but this was a tempting offer and I was happy to lower their profit margin. Anyways, I first called them at around 7:45pm. You know, after dinner and a bit of work & clean-up. I got the usual “your call is important” stuff and waited. As I said, I don’t really mind as I have a hands free phone and I always have something to do other than listening to their music. Then suddenly, at 8:00pm I was disconnected with a very friendly message: “Our office is now closed, please call back tomorrow. Thank you, bye now, *click*”
Wow… I was telling myself that not only this is totally inappropriate (how many customers got the “boot” like me?) but it was very un-professional if not amateurish at best. Those call centers know that X number of people are waiting and they should start refusing people in advance based on the estimated call length. You could also stop taking calls at 8pm but for the love of god (replace with preferred deities here) please don’t treat people like this. It’s really bad. I don’t even hang up to telemarketers although I don’t really appreciate their existence (who does?).
People work during the day. I’m not going to exit a meeting to cancel my credit card, come on! I leave work early, live close to my work place and yet, I am not available until 7:00pm - 7:30pm. Why can’t I cancel my card at 2:00am if I want to? I mean, the service is already outsourced to a different time zone anyways so it’s not like workers over there are anxious to get home and have dinner. It’s the middle of the night anyways.
The moral of the story
End users can’t and don’t want to take this sort of behaviour from big companies. If you don’t offer exceptional (or at least very good) service, people will leave you and go see your competitor. It’s one thing to get a new customer but it’s another thing to keep him loyal to you. I think this applies in every company. Be it a large company or a 1 person startup. I’m taking notes and so should you.
The theory behind customer satisfaction
Ok, now you may laugh a bit but I just came up with a theory. It’s very simple and it is based on the sigmoidal curve. The variables don’t quite follow a typical sigmoidal function and are as follow:
x is the size of the company
y is the size of the market
z is the adaptation to the growing market
z is a special variable. It is the adaptation to the market growth. The faster your market grows, the more users will experiment bad service as you simply can’t keep up with your market growth. How well or how bad you do will dictate how fast you reach the dissatisfaction plateau. That’s why the curve starts slowly, is rather abrupt in the middle and ends slowly. The middle part is the hectic part where management desperately tries to fix things but they simply can’t. The dissatisfaction plateau is inevitable if x and y are large unless you are quick at adjusting the z variable.
So you can be a large company, sell a specific item to a small market and have a very good ratio. For example GE which sells medical equipment to hospitals, might score well here as they also have the ability to rapidly adapt well to a growing market. However, GE also sells appliances like stoves and fridges and I suspect they will score less there.
So if you are a small or medium business, you must ensure that you have a growth plan otherwise “z” will take you down and you will lose a lot of customers.
2 Responses to “Why do we take all that crap?”
October 4th, 2007 at 8:09 pm
I had a pretty bad experience with Best Buy with their so-called complete 3-years guarantee. The tech support is completely incompetent, it was a similar problem like yours where they should have tested for more than 5 minutes. Guess what? They didn’t.
The worst part of it all was that this took 3 months and a half. THEY TOOK A FRICKING 100 DAYS TO POWER ON AND THEN OFF A LAPTOP.
compare it to another experience I had last week, this was with Dell. i was already out of the 1-year guarantee, but the support girl said it’s ok. she told me step-by-step instructions to check the hardware. after a few minutes, she concluded that the part was not functioning and that I will receive the next day a new one. that got me impressed. one, because she was very knoweldgeable. two, because they accepted to repair even though the guarantee was finished. three, because i got the new part the day after, a support guy came and installed it.
October 4th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
I’m Dell-biased as I worked a lot with them in the past and I agree they have good service at least on the enterprise side. I don’t know about the customer side but hearing your story doesn’t surprise me.
I’m not trying to promote anyone but Dell was always willing to come over when we had a problem. They even came once to perform a firmware upgrade (well it was on a pretty expensive NAS so I understand them in a way!)
As far as your best buy story, I’m not surprised. People working there are sales persons and their average age experience is very low. Having a semi-professional appearance is good enough to be hired.
This bring an interesting question. Any good computer store catering to geeks?