John Linton
We began a program some 9 months ago to eliminate, as far as that is possible in contemporary Australian society, 'complaints' about anything that we had a reasonable degree of control over. It would be nice to be able to aim at eliminating complaints completely but that can never be possible because there are several aspects of providing communications services that require actions by organisations and people over which we have no control. There are also a small percentage of people to whom we, or any other company, provides services that will always find something to complain about. We have been working on the Exetel User Facilities since the day we opened for business and have continued to build in functionality and refine current tools as we get suggestions from customers or come up with our own ideas. Based on the feedback from customers who transfer to Exetel from other ISPs our user facilities are far more comprehensive than those of other ISPs. Our aim is to provide our customers with easy to use tools to allow them to do many things themselves that require them to call the help desk of other ISPs to carry out for them....everybody wins from this approach.
I read this article earlier today:
http://blogs.wsj.com/wallet/2009/08/05/how-to-complain-about-a-company/tab/article/
which offers some sound advice to people who believe they have a legitimate complaint and also read the associated articles such as this one:
http://www.bbb.org/us/Consumer-Complaints/Statistics/
which gives a very valuable perspective on the 'trends' in the USA.
Compared to 9 months ago our program to reduce complaints has produced some encouraging results in that monthly complaints have approximately halved over that period. So it is possible to analyse what is causing customers to legitimately complain and address the core reasons that are producing complaints/queries. It's a fairly simple process and easy enough to eliminate complaint types once you have identified the root cause and agree that it isn't the way you want to run your business. When you find something you are doing wrong it is only a matter of changing a procedure or eliminating a source of annoyance to eliminate future complaints.
Since we started Exetel we have worked on automating as much of the customer information and support processes as possible which, after six years of continuous work, are as good as we can get them. In combination with that automation we have now been able to reduce call wait times to the lowest in the Australian industry and we like to think that this recent feedback (today) illustrates what can be achieved via the automation process and only hiring very knowledgeable engineers to provide support:
I would like to say a big thank you for the excellent fast service I have received since submitting my new application last week I am new customer and can advise I am all up and running within 4 business days of submitting my new ADSL2+ application. I have been very impressed with everything thus far such as:
Helpful knowledgeable help desk that picked up straight
away
Online new application status tracker
Confirmation Emails and telephone call message
Great Windows 7/vista Gadget for net usage
A vast amount of options and info in the my account log in section.
Existing Voip service working without having to touch it.
ADSL service working great with only having to change my modem's username and password to reconnect to the web.
The only thing I couldn't easily find is where positive feedback should be directed. I have sent this email to this address as I didn't know where else to send it though wanted to let someone know my new user experience.
Regards Blair
If we could duplicate this level of happiness 100% of the time then we would reach our goal of zero complaints. It's rare to receive such emails and there is the fortunately even rarer one that is the direct reverse of this one but today's email does show what full automation and 'instant' telephone response times can achieve in terms of making a process 'complaint-proof'. Undoubtedly increasing the automation and refining the automation processes will continue to be a major part of our complaint education program. We will also continue to expand our wiki approach to providing our customers with trouble shooting information and will continue to try and give them their own access to line diagnostic tools and, if we can persuade our suppliers, some of the fault resolution tools that are available to us.
Something to aim at.
PS: More speculation on where Telstra currently stands on selling its PSTN:
http://www.theage.com.au/business/the-politics-of-delay-its-about-the-wrong-number-20100308-psrz.html