Are you being served?

What good customer service looks like:

I have a small problem with my web hosting: permissions have been scrambled somewhere and a file can’t be created on the server. I know how to resolve it – an email to my hosting company. It’s acknowledged immediately, and within minutes I get a personal response. None of this “no reply to this account” nonsense. I exchange a few emails with more information. The problem gets fixed. Then a nice touch; we exchange tweets afterwards. There’s a social aspect to what was a very easy transaction. Other people will see this and think: they’re good guys, they obviously love what they do. And they do.

The web hosting company is called A Small Orange. Big thanks to Dave Briggs for recommending them. They’re somewhere in the USA. I don’t know exactly where; I don’t need to. But I do know the names of their support guys. I pay the company a pittance each year for their hosting and their helpdesk, which is always prompt and courteous, day or night.

They’re my idea of what a good service organisation is (before the accountants move in and it all gets bigger, greedier, chopped-down and off-shored in an attempt to squeeze out a few more drops of profit).

What bad customer service looks like:

I went into my bank the other day. I only go into my bank for one reason these days – to pay in cheques. I’ve always taken a paying-in slip, filled out the details scrupulously and handed it over with my cheque. I used to get a paper receipt; a while ago that became instant electronic confirmation. Fine by me.

Time before last, I took my filled-in paying-in slip to the counter. Oh, just put your card in the machine there, I’m told. So I do. And I politely ask if I need to use the slips now. £-> No, we can do it all through the machine. So, I suggest, why don’t you tell people that? Before they’ve picked up a pen? Perhaps with a small sign above the paying-in slips? Or indeed instead of the paying-in slips (with perhaps a small, discreet supply for those who don’t have their card with them. Except they all will have).

Time freezes. Cold, reptilian stare from cashier. £-> We can’t do that. P-> Why not? £-> [now making it up, facial tics breaking out like England flags on builders’ vans] Because some people like to use the slips. P-> So offer them the choice? £-> We don’t do it like that. P-> Do you have a way of passing ideas like that up within the branch, y’know, to maybe get things to change? I’ve just spent a couple of minutes filling in a form I had absolutely no need to. £-> I’ll make a note and raise it with my manager [lie]. Then card in machine, 20 seconds later, all done.

Last visit, I marched straight to the cashier, slipless. More rolling of lizard eyes at me: £-> You can’t use the machine today. This one isn’t working. P-> What about that one? £-> I’m working here. Fill this slip in please. P-> Do they go down often? £-> Yes. And sometimes we turn them off, especially when we’re busy. They slow things down. (I gaze around empty branch. It’s 10.30am. And 20 seconds is SLOW? What are you measuring here, exactly? Your time or mine?). Here, I’ll fill the slip in for you if you give me your card. (Aha, a glimmer of customer service, at last?)

And then the final straw: the slip is hastily scrawled with account number, sort code and total amount (compare that with the fields on the picture below) and through the rollers it whizzes. It doesn’t get spat back out because there’s no signature or branch name. And if those scrawls were Optically Character Recognised I’ll be hugely impressed – the details were all rekeyed in any case as far as I could see.

So for how many years, LloydsTSB (yes, you, though I suspect all banks are similar) have you been making fools out of millions of your customers by making them fill in information you don’t even bloody well need? Want to add all that up and tell me you’re designing things around them?

It goes without saying that I pay Lloyds Bank rather more than A Small Orange each year for their services. Can I contact them at anything approaching a human level? No. Do they have the remotest culture of improvement and customer service? No.

Serious offer: I’d love to meet someone responsible for LloydsTSB service design and give them (a limited amount of free) advice on small, simple changes to design, process and culture, that might just make them look a bit more like small giants of customer service, rather than the antediluvian dullards they are today.

But I suspect they don’t read blogs.

Now, if only I can persuade A Small Orange to offer UK retail banking services…

If you HAVE to have a form – try this: (and perhaps say sorry at some point)