I woke up this morning with game theory on the brain. Several things I’d read over the years suddenly clicked into place – epiphany!
Epiphanies are fun.
I wrote a whole blog post in my head, which I’m now setting aside until later because Pete Abilla at the Shmula blog wrote a post on customer service.
Oddly, there’s a lot in Pete’s short post that was in my head this morning.
He outlines the problem context: Customer service interactive voice response (automated attendant) systems are ungodly annoying.
He describes a work around (a way to game the system): The Direct Line application for the iPhone which will automatically get you to a live person.
He describes why the current game fails: He says: ”If a customer is calling customer service, there was already a service failure — do not add insult to injury…”
and
He outlines some goals and objectives of a healthy version of this game:
Make it easy for the customer to speak with a human; the customer needs to speak with a human:
…even though there was a first failure somewhere, customer service can act as an effective and strategic response to the customer…
…help the customer feel successful.
IVR systems maximize for the amount a company is spending on customer support. Pragmatically, companies can argue that people get information faster with in IVR because the IVR directs calls quickly and effectively to the appropriate representative.
But people like Pete (and myself) who work with lean systems and efficiency for a living, would pick up this iPhone app in a heartbeat. The game here for the user is to feel better faster. We are going to feel better with a live representative long before a seemingly endless session of pushing buttons.
(And, for the love of god, someone tell me why every system asks for my account number and then -- after I spend forever entering all the digits and having some robot read them all back to me … very … slowly – the freaking agent asks for my account number again!?")
So companies need to ask themselves what are the true games of customer service. Pete has done a great job of saying what the game for the customer is and showing that Direct Line gives the user the ability to play that game on their terms.
Photo: Kenn Kiser and Morguefile
Blogged at my house in Seattle, WA.
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