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Number
81: December 15, 2004
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This week in Katydid:
Caught
in the Amana Whirlpool
One of your fellow subscribers wrote to me her tale of woe of being
caught in the Amana
whirlpool. It is a sadly familiar lament on the failures of customer
service, which companies increasingly use to augment sales while
neglecting its value to marketing.
It goes like this: Our friend (I'll call her Mary) bought an Amana
refrigerator. She specifically chose a brand she felt would be
problem-free for 20 to 30 years. It is a refrigerator after all: a box
of insulation, some coolant, and a compressor. It pretty much has one
moving part.
Well, the refrigerator died; the food spoiled and Mary was left with
storing her remaining perishables on the back porch (thank goodness for
Midwestern winters). She borrowed space in the neighbors' and the
church's fridge. Then, for service, she called the store from which she
purchased the appliance. They sent out an authorized repair person who
promptly and easily identified the problem as a failed compressor, which
he could not fix.
You see, the store's authorized repair person was not an
Amana-authorized repair person. He could make the repair, but that would
void the warranty. She needed to contact Amana directly. So, wondering
why the authorized Amana dealership would send an un-Amana-authorized
authorized repair person to service her Amana appliance, Mary called
Amana's customer service department.
Wherein she became entangled in the worst
customer service 'solution' ever devised: the phone menu tree. These
are fine with one or two levels, but she encountered many levels, and
tried many different branches, and each one kept giving her the same
automated recording of a phone number to try – the same phone number she
had just called. She was literally spinning in an Amana customer service
whirlpool.
Now, Mary is a librarian. She's no fool and she's not lacking
resourcefulness. She is to whom you go when you need to find out how to
find out something. Still, everything she tried ended in the same
cul-de-sac of calling the number she called.
If only Mary had gone online to the Amana web site to find an authorized professional
servicer near her, she would have been able to enter her zip code, and
find a list of… well, an 800 number for factory service. It may be a
different number than the one she called because when I tried it, I was
able to connect fairly quickly to hold status, which at least gives you
the idea that you are waiting to talk to a person.
Then she remembered something she read somewhere. (Librarian,
remember?) If you want to get out of a phone tree, dial zero twice
(0-0). She tried it, and received a message that she had dialed an
invalid extension; she was then transferred promptly to an operator.
Thus, she entered the second Amana customer service vortex: the
pass-along. Nobody seemed to be able to take care of her. She gave one
service representative her model and serial number and was transferred
to another rep, who requested her model and serial number, who
transferred her to a third rep, who asked for her model and serial
number. "Well," she thought, "At least I'm talking to
humans now; that's progress."
Finally, she connected with someone who could schedule her service
appointment. They gave her an eight-hour window for four days later.
Beggars can't be choosers, so she fed her loving family non-perishable,
pre-fabricated food for the rest of the week. When the day arrived, she waited for
the confirmation phone call, which did not come. Finally, she checked
her voice mail and found a message from the servicer (a likely
sub-contractor) checking to see if she was around. In a panic, she
contacted service again (each time, dialing 0-0, and getting passed
around three times), finally to hear that he would be there in 45
minutes. She raced home to meet him just in time.
In seconds, by plugging in and unplugging the appliance, he diagnosed
the problem as a failed compressor, which he would have to order.
"But didn't you bring one with you?"
"Ma'am," he had clearly been warned that this woman was
an irate customer, "I can't carry every kind of part with me on
my truck."
"Didn't they tell you to bring the compressor? I told them
that I had already had a repair person tell me that the compressor was
the problem. I gave them the model and serial number repeatedly."
"Ma'am, they didn't give me any information about you."
"Well couldn't you have walked me through plugging and
unplugging the refrigerator over the phone?"
Well, that's just not how things are done. The authorized servicer
did let her know that she could schedule a four-hour window instead of
the eight-hour window, which came in handy when she called back to
schedule the actual repair. At first, the customer service
representative didn't think that was possible, but with Mary now truly
irate, the rep made an exception.
At each point in every pass-around, the customer service
representatives did something else: the up-sell. Now, up-sells make
perfect sense for happy customers, but when you ask irate customers who
are calling in for warranty repair if they would like to extend their
warranty, you're just begging for a sarcastic response (if not
profanity). It was clear that sales had a very strong influence over the
customer service department, but marketing had little.
Amana, whose tagline is The Art of Common Sense™, needs to apply
some to their customer service problem. They need to get marketing
involved in the customer experience. Mary might have misunderstood the
menu. She might have been given an obsolete phone number. She might also
have been won over at any point. Instead, she is a
marketing nightmare: an angry woman with resources to vent her
frustration, a woman converted to purchasing from any other brand than
Amana, a woman who now has a terrific story full of drama and intrigue
that she will re-tell with passion at every party for whomever will
listen.
This is the silent killer for companies, the
ad hoc customer support network. People gather online to
share their stories. This can be a great wake-up call for marketing to
identify problems and take steps to rectify them. It's easy to think
you've lost them, but I've found that even one person who goes out of
their way to make things right can redeem a potential customer. Mary is
still waiting and in the meantime, she's telling her story.
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Kind regards,
Kevin Troy Darling
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