Getting customer care right

Update: So 48 hours later I still don’t have email. Thanks to a load of misleading and inaccurate information from Web Africa I decided to not pull my domain name from Web Africa and point it somewhere else yesterday or even this morning.

Apparently 2.000 domain names were affected.

I am still waiting for the CEO of Web Africa to return my call.  I hope he does and can explain this catalogue of disasters. (His PA did get back to me, but couldn’t really do anything to help at that stage). In any case I will very soon be an ex-customer of Web Africa, and move to an ISP where “service” actually means something.

Mistakes do happen. But I stand by my view that total transparency with both your staff and customers is the best policy.

Anyone who follows me on Twitter or Facebook today is probably sick to tears of me whinging about my lack of email and website thanks to a DNS foul-up at Web Africa, my ISP.

Now while I still am not 100% sure of what actually happened, these are my thoughts around the experience from a customer care point of view. This is something I am paying a lot of attention to at the moment, as I am about to launch a new venture that will both rely on and differentiate itself by extraordinary customer care.

1. Realise the magnitude of the problem – quickly. I first reported the problem at 5 pm on Wednesday. When I checked my email on Thursday morning and called the support centre to check in, I got the distinct impression that there were no alarm bells ringing at all at Web Africa yet.
2. Be grateful that your service is that important to your customers and treat them accordingly. The fact that I called in about my email and web site being down before 6 in the morning should have been a clue to the support person that I wasn’t just waiting for Facebook updates and cocktail party invitations. That I was relying on their service for business critical reasons, and that in fact my livelihood relies on my connectivity.
3. Share information. I get that sometimes this is difficult, especially when you are still establishing the extent of the problem. But explain what is going on, and why you can’t advise on whether this is a 30 minute problem or a 28 hour (at time of writing) problem. Don’t under estimate your customers and similarly don’t bamboozle them with jargon. A simple: “the computer that translates your URL into computer speak seems to have failed. We’re trying to find out if this is a slight spasm or a monumental cock-up. In the meantime, your options are X, Y or Z. Why not keep an eye on our site for updates.”
4. Empower your staff with information. The poor first line support guys are doing their best in the face of frustrated and angry customers. The least you can do is give them the information in point 3.
5. Make this information easily accessible elsewhere. And useful. And update it. When I eventually was told where the alerts are posted on the Web Africa site, they turned out to be the most unhelpful things in the world, without a date and time stamp, and weren’t updated regularly. How about using Twitter for this? Or another channel that your customer uses. Being able to get some information on a regular basis would have stopped me phoning the helpdesk on the hour, and then later on the half hour, further adding to everyone’s workload, frustration and expense.
6. When a more senior support person steps in to appease the irate customer, make sure they actually have something to say. Hats off to the person who did contact me when he said he would, but what a shame he actually told me less than the first line guys, couldn’t offer any other solutions, and really didn’t add that much to the party.
7. Don’t make promises you can’t keep. At least five times today I was told that my domain name was being fast-tracked for resolution. Awesome. Except I knew that everyone who was phoning in was being told the same thing. Let’s assume that was 100 people. So, I’m first in line, with 100 other people – not going to work. And you know what, it didn’t.
8. Compensation. I’m still trying to decide what the best thing is to do here. Today, I asked for some form of compensation, and I asked that someone contact me about this after the issue had been resolved. I am pleased that Web Africa is going to offer me compensation, but I am feeling a bit ungrateful at the moment because a) the issue is still not resolved and b) because it was offered to me in the middle of the whole fiasco, it feels more like a “let’s do something to shut this crazy woman up” rather that a “gosh we are really sorry for screwing up, please accept this token of our sincere apologies”. (BTW – embrace your crazy, enraged, het up customers. They care enough to contact you, rather than simply walking across the road to your competitor).
9. Apologise. And empower your first line people to apologise. I remember when I was at school and did a brief stint at a South Africa retailer for a holiday job, we were told, if anything happens to a customer you must never apologise. It’s admitting guilt and leaves the company open to litigation. (Clearly they were reading from a handbook someone had picked up in the USA!) Thank god that this is changing, and that many millennial companies are happy to put their hands up, say we screwed up, we’re sorry and we’re going to fix it in these ways. I do think many (most?) South African companies still need to learn this lesson.
10. Treat your support staff like princes and princesses. They are the face and voice of your company for your customers (those people who pay your wages, remember?) and are so often the worst paid, have the worst working conditions and are disempowered and poorly informed. I love the idea of every single person in a company, especially the CEO, doing regular stints at the helpdesk.

This is not intended to be a dig at Web Africa specifically. For a start I think it’s too easy to hammer companies nowadays using social media, and that often people don’t think before they post. As I mentioned, customer care is something I have been thinking about a lot recently, and today’s experience crystallised a few thoughts for me.

Having said that, Web Africa, I really, really, really would like to have me email back up right about now.

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