Interesting post over at Church of the Customer Blog about customer service (or lack of it)
What tweaked my interest was the comments:
One company that’s setting new standards for customer service call centers is Netflix. For instance, Netflix has:
- Eliminated e-mail-based customer service inquiries.
- All questions, complaints and suggestions go to its Hillsboro, Oregon call center, not an offshore vendor.
- Customer support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
- The wait time to talk to a customer service rep posted on the Help page of the website. Current wait time as I write this: less than 1 minute.
- A policy that allows call center reps to talk to customers as long as is needed — no incentives to get off the phone quickly.
- Two blogs, one written by the team who adds the social elements to the site, and one written by CEO Reed Hastings
It understands the value of a customer support center as a competitive advantage. Now if only more telecom and wireless companies did.
If only our local telco’s could deliver this kind of service.
I don’t know about you but in my expereince TelstraClear is at least a 15-30 minutes wait to get the call center and I am still waiting after one phone call and an email 3 days ago for Vodafone to get back to me.
One of the interesting things about working for Xero is the experience of working with a team of Interaction Designers (Usability experts). It certainly makes me look at websites from a different perspective.
The other day I needed to change my life insurance policy.I talked to my insurance broker (as you do) who recomended that we change all our policies to a new provider as it was (marginally) cheaper. However the media had done a good job of convincing me that this may have been due to a differrent commission structure rather than for my own benefit (whether the recomended changes was for his commission benefit I don’t acually know).
So I googled for an online insurance provider after remember hearing an ad somewhere earlier and found http://www.pinnaclelife.co.nz/
Things I liked:
- The site layout was simple and uncluttered
- The site made a great use of flash to make things interactive without going over the top
- They don;t hit you with all the medical quiestions till 1/2 through the process (after you have mentally signed up) and didit with a little bit of humour
- They had price comparisons with alternative offerings
- They allowed me to create a draft policy and gave me 14 days to think about it before it expired
- They sent me a friendly followup email a couple of days after I completed the draft policy
One of the preconceptions I had about Website Usability before joingin Xero is that it was all about site layout and images. As you can see from the list above it is more about ensuring the user has an experience that is succesfull for both them and you.
