When Customer Service Gets Lost

As an expert in consumer behavior, I take a professional interest in customer service. I like to think this helps me be more appreciative of the good; I realise how much effort goes on behind the scenes to train and equip the people I'm talking to.

But I also see through the bad experiences I have with something of an appreciation for what the company concerned is doing.

Often dysfunctional customer service stems from organisations forgetting that satisfying consumers is what it has to do above everything else.

When an organisational restructuring takes place (whatever size the company) the first question should always be, "How will this affect our customers' experience with us?".

When such decisions are taken for organisational process efficiency or cost efficiency without consideration for the customer problems often arise.

I'm in the process of moving house... Wednesday is M-day (move day).

Because internet access is so important to my work I was on the ball with the internet service switch over. My internet provider (Zen, who delight in employing clever people who like understanding stuff and solving problems and are a great example of how British people can provide excellent customer service) advised me to get a simultaneous move code from my phone line provider so that there would be no loss of service.

I got the code gave it to Zen and all was well until an email arrived saying that the company who had given me the code had declined it. My internet wouldn't be available for at least a week.

This wasn't ideal. I was a teensy bit cross.

So I picked up my phone and rang the phone provider.

BT.

BT. A company that would still be my internet provider if they had been able to transfer my account from BT Business to BT Connect instantly. Instead they could transfer it to a competitor instantly but not, it transpired, to another division of their own company. !?!

Except it wasn't as simple as picking up the phone and dialing BT.

The first person I spoke to - after I'd put in the phone number to identify who I was and selected the only option on the phone menu that fitted the bill - said I needed to speak to someone else on a different number. BT - a telecommunications company - couldn't transfer my call.

So I rang a new number, entered all the same information, and spoke to the next person. This person wasn't the right person either. But they too knew who was and transferred me to someone else.

Only that person wasn't the right person either.

Nor was the person she transferred me to.

Nor was the next person, who confidently transferred me to someone else. A nice chap in India.

He wasn't the right person either. He knew who the right person was though, or so he said, but he couldn't transfer me. He gave me another number, naming a department I was sure had come up before on my telecommunications travels, but with a different number.

This person was the right person to speak to. At last. Except that she wasn't. She told me that BT Openreach dealt with the code but that they weren't a customer facing business.

So I asked who I could speak to who was "customer-facing". "No one".

"But," I pointed out, "someone had given me the code, they had "customer-faced me. Could I speak to them."

"No. That person was just passing on the number. We're essentially just a customer of BT Openreach."

Feeling that the name of the company was a clue I suggested that BT and BT Openreach were actually part of the same company.

"No, they're not" she said.

This seemed unlikely. So I rephrased my question. "If I was a shareholder in BT - an entirely hypothetical point - wouldn't I own both BT and BT Openreach in the same share?"

"No, they're separate companies." She then tried to give me an example involving a retail entrepreneur who owns a football club. A totally different situation where one man does own two different companies.

Whilst I'd been talking I had Googled BT Openreach and found them described as "a BT Group Business" on their home page.

I pointed this out.

I was put on hold for a long time.

"Yes", she said, "we are part of the same company, but they still aren't customer-facing so they won't speak to you."

"But they will speak to you won't they? You can ask them why they declined the code they gave you to give to me?"

"No. They won't speak to us."

So, half an hour older but no wiser I went back to Zen to see what they could do.

I went straight through to someone who found my details and offered to help. He tried to get the person who'd been dealing with it already to speak to me but he was on another call. So he took my number and said he would look into it in the meantime, but would get the original chap to call back.

Total call length two minutes.

The person I'd spoken to called me back within fifteen minutes. He had sorted out the problem and my internet connection change-over was back on track.


This is the second time I've run into BT's ridiculous organisational structure. They have divided their business into operations that their own employees don't understand.

They have created sub-brands that mean nothing to customers.

The biggest advantage of having an all-encompassing supplier is lost; the different divisions pass customers between them.

One issue from a customer perspective involves several elements of the organisation (which is fair enough). But does the customer have to live through each part of the process with different people?

The only conclusion I can draw is that it is far better to select specialist suppliers because with the large organisation you get no benefit. Instead you get an absence of responsibility, the difficulty of identifying which part of the massive group is the part you need, and people who know they are anonymous: Sherlock Holmes would struggle to track down "Lynn" through eight redirected calls and across several thousand employees at multiple sites in multiple continents.

Philip Graves
Consumer Behavior Expert

www.philipgraves.net