The Comcast Customer Service Fail - Who's to Blame?
This week, Ryan Block became a rapidly recognized name the social media and customer service worlds. All Ryan had to do was post a recording of his experience while attempting to disconnect from a service provider.
Who's to blame for this now infamous service failure?
I learned a long time ago that we need to focus on "doing right things, right". I am confident that the customer service associate believed he was doing the right thing. I will suggest that he was following points included in his training, working hard to achieve an incentive, following the goals for customer retention at Comcast. This poor associate (I believe) was unaware that it is possible to "do the right thing, wrong"!
There are some critical lessons we should all take away from this interaction:
- The organization's customer philosophy, policy must be to ALWAYS deliver (at a minimum) satisfaction. It should be done as expeditiously as possible and have a built in "check" that satisfaction was achieved (i.e. "What else can I do for you, is there anything else you need, did we meet your expectations", etc.).
- Incentives must align with the behaviors desired. This associate was rewarded to retain the customer, not to please or satisfy the customer. The goals and incentives that this department demonstrates clearly promote ORGANIZATIONAL gain and not CUSTOMER satisfaction.
- Training must provide the skills and understanding of what tactics to employ in achieving the goal of customer success. Some of that training has to help associates balance what the organization wants and what the customer wants when they are different (i.e. "I will definitely help you discontinue your service with us. In an effort to improve for our remaining customers, may I ask what brought you to this decision?")
- Organizations must hire wisely and monitor the performance of ALL customer-facing personnel. Some people simply do not like working with other people. In fact, some situations can make it painful for those of us who LOVE working with other people! All the training and incentives in the world won't make the wrong employees great customer service providers.
- When a service failure (or in this case, service catastrophe) occurs, the organization must do more than apologize. Now is the time to review and revise all that is mentioned previously. An overhaul of your customer vision and philosophy, rewarding the right behaviors, training the right responses and positioning the right people for success – the customer’s success, the employee’s success and the company’s success.
In this recent and viral example, I don’t think we can put all the blame on the customer service representative. We certainly can’t blame the customer. The Comcast service failure is clearly an organization doing right things – the WRONG WAY!
Director Of Customer Service at Molteni&C|Dada
10ySadly there are numerous companies that train their CSR to follow a script & get their numbers in. Majority of the time these reps have no self functioning brain that can deviate from the script in order to properly handle customer issues. Having been a Director of CS for 38 years this is not how to run your CS Dept. Customer loyalty & retention needs a white glove touch at all times. Every customer & situation is different from the next & needs to be treated as such. Personally I would never do business with a company who forces their reps to follow a dialog & crunch numbers ...never mind work for one. I still believe in the power of WOWing a customer as the Domino Effect is a powerful tool and this story is a perfect example of it.
Efficacious Leader | Titanium Team Builder | Transformational Speaker | Conscience | Present | Asker of What If | Disrupter of Norms | Positive Culture Protector
10yAllow me to respectfully add that I keep seeing comments that talk more about blame instead of how to correct the issue. The perspective of blame is going to be dependent upon who's view it is coming from. I for example believe that blame is not the right word to use here but to look into what behaviors drove this behavior is more on point. In doing that it will uncover the gaps and holes. I think we'll find that the Comcast culture was broken all the way from upper management, training, managers, associates and all the way down to the customers that kept paying them money for what is being termed as horrid service. I would really be interested in the philosophy of the fix versus going back and forth about who we need to lynch. That just does not seem to be productive in my eyes. I think we can all learn for this Comcast misstep and better our own organizations. The debate about right, wrong or blame is not helping any of us to grow or helping this move forward. Just a thought and again I submit this thought from my perspective. Not right or wrong but my own perspective. Kenn Dillard Global Customer Care Director
Even if this were a Comcast cultural issue, which I assure you it is not, then Mr. Block has no room to talk. As a “journalist” for AOL, he works for the company that made cancelling your service paramount to getting the IRS to apologize for their mistake. In the 80’s and 90’s any and all customers of AOL wishing to cancel their service, literally had to send a certified letter to AOL HQ and stop charging them the monthly fees. AOL didn’t have belligerent save agents because you could never talk to ANY agent! The lines were busy 24x7 just like the modem lines that you, as their customer, were paying to access the Internet through.
This is such a crock! It is a manufactured “crisis” by a journalist (and I use that term skeptically) that had nothing else to write about and was looking for a topic to self-promote himself. I have done side-by-sides on hundreds of live Comcast save calls over the years and I can assure you that this is not a problem with Comcast’s culture as Mr Block suggests. This was a case of ONE overzealous save agent (and of course he gets paid more to save customers Ms. Yellen) out of thousands and one phone call out of nearly a million calls that Comcast took that day.
Contractor, Installation Technician
10yI agree, the CSR is going to follow his training, he obviously had some level of scripting in front of him. Comcast is missing the point of service, the needs of the customer have to come first, in this case the customer simply wanted ti disconnect, why would anyone want to provide a customer experience like, Retention is one thing, but there is no way I would return to that type of customer service. He really should have requested a supervisor.