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Continued from Part 1
Mid-day on Wednesday, I go to the web site to check my order. It's "processing." That's all the data I can get from the web site.
Don't provide useful online order status on your e-commerce site. The notation of "processing" tells me nothing. Does that mean it's not been looked at yet? Or is someone putting it in a box? Or is the computer just thinking? Other sites clearly tell you that your order is shipped, pending clearance, and so forth. CompUSA's site tells you little, and doesn't even tell you what you should expect to see. It's cheaper to have customers use a web site than use a toll-free number, especially if you have long hold times.
I called the toll-free number listed on the web site for order inquiries. This is where I discovered the woeful lack of staffing in this department, as I encountered my first of many ten-minute hold times.
Keep those hold times long. Your customers have nothing better to do than wait around for your representatives, especially when they're already upset. They generally aren't calling to say they're perfectly happy--they call because they're upset. The modern consumer rankles when they hear "your call is important to us," because they know it's a bald-faced lie. If the call really was important, it'd be answered in seconds rather than tens of minutes.
Inundate the customer with ads and interruptions. Yes, it's sheer genius to bombard a pissed-off customer with advertisements for products... especially products like extended warranties and pay-per-call technical support. The subconscious message of such products is "we'll make you pay for these basic services that ought to be free," a message that will just get customers more worked up. Even worse, CompUSA interrupts their own ads to remind you that your call is important and that you should hold. The constant interruptions keep snapping your attention back to the call prematurely, as you keep hoping the momentary silence indicates someone is about to answer your call.
The staffer on the line told me that my order had not shipped, because my shipping address didn't match the address on my card. I explained my conversation with the credit department, which went right over the representative's head. They could not grasp the contradiction, and kept quoting the company line about the shipping address.
Put your customers in a Catch-22. You need to have your shipping address on your credit card, but you can't put a shipping address on your credit card. If CompUSA can't get this right with their own card, where they presumably have control over both sides of the problem... how would it work with a normal bank card?
Force all independent thought out of your phone staff. It speaks poorly for a company when the front-line staff can't see -- or, at least, admit -- the contradictions inherent in a Catch-22 problem. Instead of trying to help the customer, they spout a "party line," leaving the customer with the impression that customer satisfaction isn't important. This is how companies get a reputation for being cold and unresponsive.
I asked to speak to a supervisor. The supervisor, Alvin Harrison, simply repeated the policy again and refused to see that this was a Catch-22. He seemed to think that it was perfectly reasonable that a customer should have their personal bills sent to their workplace, or even to change their billing address and then change it back after the order arrived. When I insisted that this was not acceptable, he became rude and dropped any pretense of being helpful.
Give no discretionary powers to supervisors. If a customer can't get help from your trained help staff, make sure that they can't get help from the next level up. This virtually guarantees a "turbo" situation, which means increased support costs for your company, and decreased customer satisfaction.
Suggest unreasonable acts to your customers. I doubt that Hal Compton, CompUSA's CEO, would change his credit card billing address twice whenever he placed an online order. Why would he approve a policy that requires his customers to do so? How could he find this to be reasonable?
Time to turbo! It takes a while to get the proper information, because CompUSA has seen quite a bit of turnover at the top in recent years. Also, it's a privately-held company, owned by a Mexican investment group. Finally, I call their corporate office in Dallas, TX. A lengthy voicemail menu offers me the option to speak to a customer satisfaction group. I select that option.
The customer satisfaction rep also spouts the party line, and takes a while to see the Catch-22 situation. She is confrontive, and I get the feeling that I am an annoyance to her and that she thinks I'm trying to "pull something," based on her tone of voice and choice of words. Finally, I hit home with the statement "Look, I want to give you $3,000 of my money, but you're making it very hard for me to do so." She agrees to resolve the problem and call me back.
Make sure your "satisfaction" people have bad attitudes. If you have a group that is intended to handle customers with complaints that haven't been satisfied through "normal means," they'd better be well trained and thick-skinned. They need to take the blame on the company's behalf and make the customer feel appreciated and wanted. Any insinuation that a customer may be involved in fraud is just going to make things worse.
Disempower your satisfaction staff. If your satisfaction staff can't use their judgement to override policies, they can't very well satisfy customers. No matter how much you thought out your policies, there will always be valid exceptions. Your satisfaction staff should be capable of judging those exceptions and acting accordingly. They should have high executive authority that sweeps across departments, so they can make things happen. Customers should know that to be the case at a fundamental level.
A while later, Alvin Harrison calls me back, a bit more contritely. He has someone from the credit department on the line. Apparently there is a "notes" field on the credit account where my ship-to address can be entered. However, this field isn't visible to the online store automation, so any future orders placed online with this ship-to address will still be rejected and delayed until I call in to verify the address and tell them about the notes field. This is just plain stupid, but it means my order can go through. Alvin tells me the order will ship this day, and arrive tomorrow. He agrees to refund the shipping cost to make up for the inconvenience.
Institute policies you can't carry out. Require credit card data that you have no good way of tracking, and which you can't use even if it does exist. This "anti-fraud" policy makes the online store worthless for anyone who doesn't stay at home all day, because CompUSA has no way to implement the policy so that it works! Customer dissatisfaction is built right into the policy.
Don't consider the requirements of policies before you enact them. It's obvious that no one got Alvin's group and the credit card people in the same room to discuss the potential issues with the shipping-address policy before it became the corporate rule. Instead, it was enacted without considering the effect on customers.
Throughout the day, I have provided my cellular number to CompUSA's employees. However, my fiancee gets two calls at our home from CompUSA. One appears on the Caller ID as 214 252-8143. That number gets the voicemail of Janine Shephard. The second call to my home stated that the display had been shipped.
At 1:30 PM EDT, I finally receive an e-mail copy of the invoice. It indicates that the sales tax is estimated.
Don't use your computers to compute things. It's not hard to look up taxes and apply them to an order. There are companies that make whole product lines that do just that. There's no reason why a customer should recieve an "estimated" invoice from an online order. It stinks of deception.
Continued in Part 3
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