Customer Experience is touted as a key differentiator with the experience’ delivered through multiple consumer channels. Barely a month goes by without some new channel being added to the consumer armoury to contact a business. Making it easy to engage superficially enhances CX but if that engagement is a set of silos then a positive experience soon turns sour.
I’m a Virginmedia Broadband & Virgin Mobile customer. According to Virgin’s marketing that makes me an OOMPH! Customer – I had no idea why they chose OOMPH! but I now believe that it’s onomatopoeia for the noise made when you get punched in the solar plexus by a 1960s superhero.
Broadband failed yesterday – as an OOMPH! I assumed I would find an update message on my phone. Nope, nothing there. Let’s move on to the phone app to check the status. The app insists it’s not going to tell me anything until I download an updated version. But the broadband is down so how am I going to do that without using my data allowance? Fortunately I’m an OOMPH! with unlimited mobile data if the broadband breaks; I can go ahead and complete the download over 4G – the updated app asks me for half-remembered log in credentials yet again.
The nice people in marketing and the folks behind the app have made it clear and easy to get the data offer – just call 789. Do I really need to make a call? Virgin know my service is broken and they know my mobile account. I dial the number anyway. It seems that no-one has told the press-x-for-this, press-y-for-that machine about OOMPH!. I tried several routes and couldn’t find an option to claim the data option or to talk to a person – unless I wanted to cancel an appointment I hadn’t made.
And from that point on the Customer Experience just got more byzantine. A loss of service had been confirmed on the app and on the press-some-more-buttons-and-hope machine – why ask the customer to ‘Register a loss of service’?
After giving up on the 789 thing I thought I’d ask for updates. After clicking the link in the app I was taken elsewhere to accept cookies and sign in again for what seemed the umpteenth time. It then asks me for the email address and mobile to send message. I’ve just logged in with my email address and as an OOMPH! my phone number is known – yes, I might want messages to be sent elsewhere but at least offer my known details first.
Mind you that was a waste of effort – 24 hours later and no messages received, even though the ‘fix time’ suggested on the web site has changed 3 times.
Don’t get me started on responses on the Twitter feed that send the customer right back to where they started like some Kafkaesque game of snakes and ladders.
I just wish that this were an isolated incident of dysfunctional Customer eXperience, but it’s all too common. I’m sure that sales and service organisations are proud of the number and variety of contact channels offered and think that simply adding choice enhances the proposition. They must pay attention to the quality not just feel the width. or all that technology and effort will go down the drain.