Mrs. K and I went shopping this morning and found a wallet on the floor.  It belonged to…well let’s just call her “Mrs. Smith” for the sake of the story.  Mrs. Smith’s purse was stuffed with pretty much every kind of plastic card you can imagine except for anything with a personal address or phone number on it.

But we thought that’s not a problem.  Mrs. Smith is a Barclays Bank customer and we can just phone her telephone banking hotline and then Barclays can pass our phone number to Mrs. Smith and she can come and collect her purse.  Simple; after all, what bank wouldn’t want to help a valued customer stressing out about her lost payment cards and personal data.

Or so we thought.

After the IVR labyrinth, we got a “human”.  Let’s not name names, but imagine that he’s called Edwin.

“Hello Edwin, we’d like to advise you that we’ve found a purse belonging to one of your valued customers.”

“Yes madam…”

“Yes.  It doesn’t have any of her personal contact details, so we phoned you.”

“Just drop the card into a local Barclay’s branch.”

“Great idea, but it’s a whole large purse full of lots of personal things and we know that she’ll be worried about having lost it.  Please can you contact your customer to tell them the purse has been found and pass on our contact details.”

“One moment please … I’m sorry madam, we don’t do that.”

“But what about your valued customer wasting her whole Sunday trying to find her purse?  Then spending Monday cancelling all her cards.  When you could just phone her now.”

“I’m sorry madam.  It’s company policy.  I suggest you hand it in at your local police station.

Causes of call centre customer service failure

How does a call centre end up being so utterly rubbish?  Here are a few thoughts:

1. Employee micro-management expunging any sense of personal initiative or responsibility.
2. Compliance culture ditto.
3. Management of outsourced call-centres through strictly detailed service level agreements.  If management by target worked, the shops would be full of great products from North Korea.  They aren’t and it doesn’t.
4. Badly scoped outsourcing arrangements and strict silos between inbound and outbound teams.
5. Outsourced call-centres are often run as projects.  The essence of good project management is to deliver exactly what’s expected. The essence of good service management is to deliver above expectations.  These are two opposite management “values”.

Over Sunday lunch, we imagined Mrs. Smith cancelling the rest of her day in a futile search for her purse.  While Edwin clocked up another exemplary day of customer service by handling our call in less than 60 seconds.

We’ve left the text of this blog post in Mrs. Smith’s purse so that she can discuss the meaning of customer service with her bank.

Related posts:

1. New utility customer service challenges
2. Five ways that customer service fails… and what to do about it
3. Contact evasion and how to avoid it

Payday loans are poisonously expensive debt wrapped in sugar-coated brand and service for poor and desperate people.  They’re innovative…and they stink.

The idea is to offer small, instant,  loans with terms of a few days or weeks to “hard working” (i.e. poor) people with an “easy” application process on a “friendly” website with an approachable brand.   This Wonga.com (daytime) TV advert captures the tone of voice:

Payday loan providers (or should that be “pushers”?) say that APR isn’t meaningful for a product with such a short-term.  On an annualised basis, it would cost over £1,000 to rent a DVD for a year, but nobody accuses Blockbusters of exploitation.  But then, nobody ever became dependent on Blockbusters.

An Office of Fair Trading report (here) shows that vulnerable customers often use high cost credit continuously.  A constant or frequent loan at 2500% APR or more is the financial equivalent of a crack addiction.

Payday loans are not the only businesses that make small, short-term loans to the poor.  So do credit unions and so does the Grameen Bank, the micro-credit institution founded by Nobel prize winner, Mohammad Yunus.  But whereas micro-credit lifts people out of poverty, payday loans can help lock them in.

What banking desperately needs in the post-credit crunch  social and political environment is the inventive product development of the Payday loan companies and the compassion of the Grameen Bank.

These loans are the evil twin of micro-credit, so the last word goes to Mohammad Yunus:

“It’s not people who aren’t credit-worthy.  It’s banks that aren’t people-worthy.“

Related posts:

1. Banking customer service. The old oxymoron
2. After Eureka: 7 questions to test innovation for big and unreasonable profit potential
3. Freelance is the new job for life