Author:  Roger Sumner

A leading wireless services provider recently “fired” some of its customers, news that was a little surprising to me.  Don’t get me wrong.  I believe that segmenting customers is a good practice, but firing customers outright can quickly become a very slippery slope.

There are basically two issues here.  First is this notion of the empowered consumer, which Gary wrote about a few weeks ago.  The wireless provider I am talking about today reportedly fired a mere 1,000 customers – not a large number when you consider that this carrier has approximately 54 million subscribers.  However, the news appeared almost immediately in several places and the story, as well as the letters that the company had issued to these customers, pretty quickly climbed to the top of Google’s main search page, creating a public relations nightmare.  Some stories and blogs alleged that perhaps the “fired” customers, who were supposedly calling customer service 40 to 50 times per month, were doing so because their problems weren’t getting resolved due to poor service.  Possibly an overstatement, but it doesn’t matter.  The brand has been denigrated, and the reputation of this company’s customer service organization has been publicly tarnished, perhaps unjustly.

Second, with all the new wireless phones and services coming out, what’s to prevent consumers from taking advantage of this precedence?  Consumers could easily begin making excessive phone calls to their wireless carriers in the hopes of getting “fired” so that they could be relieved of contractual obligations.  Hmmm…maybe I should call my current carrier 50 times this month so that I can get out of my contract and activate the iPhone I’ve been dreaming about - the iPhone that offers service only through AT&T.  Just a thought …

The point is that companies need to be careful about how they handle high-cost customers.  If a large subset of customers requires multiple interactions to resolve an issue, then it is clear that a company needs to examine its service.  Perhaps agents need more training, or maybe new technology can be implemented to give agents better access to the information they need to solve customer problems in real-time.  Callback policies may be another option, giving agents the time they require to appropriately research and respond to more complex issues. Callbacks can be used in conjunction with email interactions to keep customers up-to-date on the status of their inquiries.  By assigning ownership, clearly communicating timeframes and setting customers expectations, companies can drastically improve customer service, and reduce repeat, and sometimes costly, phone calls.

One last thought.  There may be a very small subset of customers that is calling just to call, as is alleged in this case.  Rather than fire these customers, why not immediately identify these callers and transfer them to voice self-service options or to outsourcers in other countries where labor is less expensive?  The end result would most likely be a reduction in the cost associated with servicing these lower potential customers and wider availability of agents to help higher potential customers. 

This carrier definitely had an interesting approach, but I don’t think I would recommend it for other companies in the future…there are too many pitfalls.  How do you handle your high-cost customers?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007 at 9:15 am and is filed under Customer Service/Consumer Demands, Voice Self Service. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.