Customer Care: Helping the 20% or Are you any better at this than Dell?

There is so much effort going into "Customer Care" these days, that there are times I think it's all just working great. It must be. Everyone says it is.

I get a lot of advertising material about systems that are designed to support Customer Care, make it "World Class", and so forth. Here's what I think. This stuff is great for the 80%.

Most of these Customer Care systems are designed to identify the 80% of common problems and make solutions to those problems happen quickly and efficiently.

Even though the whole project team knows the system is designed this way, everyone acts like the other 20% don't exist. When we encounter an incident from that 20%, we keep stuffing it back into the other set of routines.

In fact, EVERY time something doesn't get resolved the first time by one of these systems, it needs to be escalated to the red team, the swat team, or whatever you call it. Because these systems DO in fact work for the 80%, anything that jams up or falls out somehow has to be one of those 20% issues. And the main pipeline of customer care can't handle the 20%. These need to be quickly routed to some skilled and empowered team who can diagnose and fix problems. They often aren't.

I think we've all been there. In the spiral from hell [see diagram above], where YOU are the one documenting the problem, YOU are the one recapping all the previous ineffective efforts to solve it, and YOU are the one coming up with ideas that might work.

Sadly, I am in one of those spiral circles right now with Dell, trying to upgrade my DataSafe backup for more space. Yup, just trying to give them money, and they don't seem to want to take it under any circumstances. I've had one online chat session, several e-mails, and a lengthy phone call with my GOLD Tech Support. [Who can't help because it is a sales problem, although heaven knows they have tried.]

Eventually, I think they are going to realize that some glitch is slowing down sales of DataSafe, investigate, and figure out that something in their fulfillment for this product is screwed up. In the interim, the Customer Care machine will keep squeezing a lemon and hoping for orange juice.

Of course this is one of the great ironies of 20% issues. QUITE OFTEN they are early warning signs of some problem on the fulfillment end. QUITE OFTEN they are valued customers, early adopters, and other people who don't give up easily. All the more reason to flag these items quickly.

You want to improve Customer Care? Start looking at how you handle the 20%.