Sunday, July 06, 2008

Destroying customer care by the weakest link

In late June I wrote about my trials and tribulations dealing with BT and its lessons for improving customer care.

Here is how the story concluded.

The story so far – my BT broadband connection suddenly dropped to the speed of an arthritic snail – the nightmare of communicating with BT’s technical help desk was something that should be outlawed under the UN’s charter on torture – lots of lessons on how not to provide “customer care”.

New week, new dawn.

I will skip out all of the detail and get straight to the point. I had two visits from BT staff, both of whom would get 5 star marks as brand ambassadors. They were technically good, understood my problem and went the extra mile to sort out the problem. Who could ask for more? Result is I now have a faster broadband connection than before the troubles started.

The moral of this saga is this. A company can only maintain its brand reputation by ensuring the whole of its customer facing service is excellent. Most parts of BT’s customer care infrastructure is first rate but its reputation risks being destroyed by a manifestly weak, but significantly large, part of its support service.

I really hope somebody from BT reads this posting, for the sake of its two, and no doubt thousands of other, top class employees who sorted out my problem. Dick Stroud

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

YOU GOT THAT RIGHT, BUDDY!

Amazing as it seems, this still happens to me at least once a month:

I find a product or service on the internet that REALLY interests me. I WANT TO BUY, if I can just get a couple of simple questions answered.

I send my questions to the e-mail address designated for questions/inquiries (enquiries).

And nothing happens.

No response.

Guess what? No sale.