A Christmas customer service story
Last Sunday evening I packed up a parcel of gifts to send to some relatives who live on the other side of the UK. I booked the parcel collection online, printed off the barcode label and had everything packed up by my front door, ready to be collected by the courier the next day.
I worked from home on Monday, and made sure I could hear the doorbell for when the parcel was due to be collected. Hours passed, still no collection. Eventually the clock ticked past 8pm, the latest time quoted by the delivery company, with still no sign of any courier and no obvious way to track their whereabouts.
The killer blow came in my email inbox a few minutes later. A very clear message from the delivery company:
“Hang on!” thought I, not only did they fail to collect the parcel, but they are trying to pin the blame on me! Suddenly the issue went from being annoying, to becoming a question of brand loyalty - I’m not going to do business with a company that so willingly lies.
It was pretty easy to understand what probably happened here. Most likely, a courier had run out of time on their route to pick up the parcel, so they had marked it in their system as parcel not ready. They might have done this so that they were not personally penalised for missing the pickup. The downstream consequences on the customer were not considered.
Of course, there was no way to contact the parcel company given in the provided email, just a link to an automated process to rebook the connection.
Fortunately for me, there was hope. I hadn’t booked the collection directly from the parcel company, but via an intermediary called Packlink. They act as a broker, offering collection and delivery services from 5-6 delivery companies. Packlink’s customer service was superb. I had to raise a ticket online but this was responded to in less than five minutes. They refunded the original booking and booked a replacement collection using a different delivery company. On Tuesday, the parcel was collected in the middle of the day, and is now safely under the tree of my family members.
Is this the ghost of Christmas past… or Christmas future?
I took away a lot of lessons from this interaction. Here are a few:
1. AI and automation has the potential to make customer experience markedly worse when deployed badly
Many customers would say this is obvious, but there is so much excitement about AI in the customer service industry currently that it’s important to keep reminding ourselves of this possibility. If we build AI and automation that makes incorrect assumptions, and offers no possibility for exceptions to be handled differently, then more customers will get stuck in “doom loops” and ultimately give up out of frustration.
2. Intermediaries that offer better customer experience will gain market share
If companies don’t invest in great customer service, then others will. Customers are increasingly turning to intermediaries that can do the hard work for them, taking a small commission in the process. In the above example, Packlink have won my loyalty by making things really easy for me, so I will continue to use them, regardless of which courier company they make use of.
3. Companies need to get better at planning for peak demand
As more work gets automated, there is less resilience in the system for when things go wrong. My issue above was caused by an excess of demand in the delivery network, meaning there was no capacity to collect the parcel. This is an entirely predictable problem at this time of year, but seemingly the delivery company hadn’t done anything to prepare customers for this: setting better expectations on timings, providing more proactive updates to customers, training delivery drivers on what to do if they cannot fulfil their roster. Some simple interventions can help to avoid large scale customer frustation.
All three of these have a common theme. They point towards a need to design customer service organisations that run service as a product that needs to be continually developed and improved. Not as a process that just needs to be run, regardless of the outcome.
Recommended news articles
The Fast Mode: BT Group, Sprinklr leverage GenAI to revolutionize customer service
BizTech Magazine: The distinctions between customer service channels are collapsing
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