InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
June 21, 1999
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IT can also play a direct, rather than supporting, role in snafus that lead to customer dissatisfaction.
E-Trade Securities Inc. ended up just one step from the bottom of a Web brokerage scorecard compiled by Keynote Systems Inc., completing just 80.5% of transactions the first week of June. E-Trade's Web site crashed on several occasions in February and wouldn't let customers make trades. To make matters worse, the business couldn't handle the flood of calls that followed the crashes. Ironically, E-Trade was in the process of adding 300 more call-center agents.
Other companies have suffered through online outages, and their reputations have suffered as a result. Just two weeks ago, online auctioneer eBay Inc. experienced its own Web-site problems, sending its stock price tumbling.
Technology can exacerbate customer-relationship problems that may have origins elsewhere. Tele-Communications Inc., the cable company acquired by AT&T, incurred a firestorm of customer criticism and anger in recent years in its Seattle operating region--in part because it didn't upgrade its network fast enough, but also because of the way it handled customer-service calls. Customers were required to call their local cable office--there wasn't a central number--with service questions and requests. But many called the wrong office, resulting in call transfers and delays.
"There was no way to make the call centers" work together as one, says John Dietrich, TCI's executive director of customer operations for the Northwest. The problem had a ripple effect because representatives who were handling those misplaced calls could have been helping customers waiting in queue. Customers kept calling back, resulting in a 10% higher call volume.
To address the problem, TCI built a multimillion-dollar call center, its second major call center in the Seattle area. But there was a learning curve for employees unfamiliar with some of the new technology in the center. The result: The call response rate dropped to only 50% to 60% of calls being answered within 30 seconds, which means many customers were left on hold. It's starting to come around now, Dietrich says, with the response rate once again climbing to 90%.
Like some other large companies, credit-card issuer First USA is the subject of several consumer-complaint Web sites. Some customers say electronic payments never went through or were delayed, resulting in late fees. The problems for Matt Goshen, a systems analyst for a software company in Tualatin, Ore., began when a thief stole his card while he was trekking in Nepal. First USA replaced the card, but with one that carried a higher interest rate. Goshen asked to close his account, which had a $400 cash surplus intended to cover expenses on the Nepal trip. First USA issued a check, but then canceled it, explaining that Goshen's account was still open.
What followed was a series of calls that often had him on hold for up to 30 minutes and in which customer-service representatives would promise action but not deliver. When he'd call back, the representative on the phone usually had no record of his previous interaction. The account is still open, despite threats by Goshen to sue First USA if it's not closed. "The head doesn't know what the tail's doing," says Goshen.
Without commenting directly on the above situation, First USA executive VP and CIO Jeff Chittenden says customer-service reps should have been able to see the necessary information because the company has a 4-terabyte data warehouse with all customer records. "If a rep sits there and says, `We didn't know about that,' then that's a problem with the rep," he says. That means that the company has to be more vigilant in training and monitoring representatives, he says.
First USA has begun using data mining to find representatives who provide poor customer service and customers who have been ill-treated. Says Chittenden, "I would like to be able to call customers proactively, and say, "You've called us three or four times with a problem. Have we fixed it yet?'"
It's no surprise that misapplied or underpowered IT leads to problems with customers. But so can technology that's implemented on time and functions according to plan. Some of the biggest culprits are products that distance businesses from their customers, such as voice-response units, the automated phone-answering systems used by many businesses. Self-service Web sites could become the E-commerce equivalent of the voice-response unit: a low-cost mechanism that makes it more difficult for customers to reach a service representative.
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Illustration by John Bleck
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