Surprising and Delighting your customer? Yeah right…
Written on 6:13 PM by RadhikaR
The hallowed halls for customer experience is often been described as the ability to "surprise and delight" your customers but that's a pretty big ask at the best of times.
A financial institution managed to do exactly that for me recently. I 'inherited' their services courtesy of a "sell off" so I certainly had no loyalty to them. After long and deliberate avoidance of their marketing materials I finally had to contact them to advise of a change of address. Normally I'd do this online, but during the transition their online platform had changed and my avoidance of the promo materials would spell disaster.
I called their call centre where I was confronted by a rather officious young (-sounding) rep. She chastised me for failing their identifying questions (that only the bill that I didn't have on me would have had the answers to and I had failed to commit these details to memory) then told tell me they would be unable to help me at all. Having pleaded that I had no online password, would like to set that up, and all I wanted to do was tell them where I had moved I was dismissed. I lost my patience by this point and reminded them that I was providing information they needed and given I had never elected to use them to begin with they could cancel my account immediately. Apparently this was something she could assist with however not before telling me
"Well I will put you through but they won't be able to help you either" (verbatim)I was 'forward passed' to another part of their call centre, and the fellow that answered sensed my frustration and proceeded to 'manage' the call in a 'solution-driven' way (oh and for the record he had an "accent"!). I explained the situation to him so he went though the identification questions with me again but included some additional ones - that I could answer. When he finished & was about to move on to the 'customer service' part, we heard another voice on the line! It was the first person I spoken to, she had stayed on the call and began reprimanding him, accusing him of acting inappropriately and threatening to report him! I was still on the call! A fact I had to remind them of and add that I was 'tweeting' the shenanigans during the call.
The poor fellow not only kept his cool, resolved my issue, and convinced me not to cancel my business with them while genuinely apologising profusely. Less than 15 minutes later I received a call from his team leader. He apologised for the interruption to my day and asked if I would be willing to discuss what happened on the call with his team member. Feeling pretty awful for the guy I had a frank discussion with his manager. What happened next was textbook ...
He reiterated their brand values as an organisation (√), emphasised that no part of their organisation could condone what had taken place (√), thanked me for supporting his staff member by telling him what happened (√) and then unexpectedly offered a generous token by way of an apology (√).
And it wasn't the money that "surprised" or "delighted" me (though always gratefully received!) it was the fact that the issue was acknowledged and dealt with so promptly. Points to these guys, they managed to turn around extremely poor judgement from one part of their business, and engage me not only a customer, but as a prospect for future business.
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