Recently, Verizon Consumer CEO Sowmyanarayan Sampath wrote to customers saying that Verizon customer service has “taken a different path” and the company is raising the bar on the customer service experience. This sounds a lot like communications with customers I’ve seen over the years from all of the big ISPs – I can think of dozens of company messages telling customers that a big ISP cares about customer service.
What’s different about Mr. Sampath’s email is that he also included an email address where customers can contact him directly if they are having a problem that is not getting resolved. I have to assume this will use a different email address from the one he uses for normal emails, because it seems likely that his inbox will quickly fill with customer complaints.
This reminded me of an experience I had back in the early 1980s when I worked at Southwestern Bell. The company had an executive telephone hotline that was supposedly a direct line to the President for customers who knew the special number. Calls to this number were recorded and landed on the desk of somebody who happened to sit close to me. I would often overhear some of the complaints that came to the executive line, and they were the normal things you would expect – overbilling, botched installations, etc. Employees around the company responded quickly to every referral from the executive hotline.
I have to think that Mr. Sampath is doing something similar and has recreated the executive hotline using an email address. If Verizon customer service is indeed getting better, I assume anybody who makes a valid claim to that email will get some attention from elsewhere in Verizon. If that doesn’t happen, this will quickly be chalked up as another big company public relations ploy rather than an actual aid for frustrated customers.
I have to wonder how well this idea will work with such a gigantic company with coast-to-coast customers. I know at Southwestern Bell that no employee wanted to get the internal message from the executive suite that they had messed up. Will that work for a much bigger company?
People who run smaller ISPs, or other small businesses that deal with the public, will laugh at this article, because fielding customer issues is a daily part of every executive’s work day. It’s something that nobody loves doing, but it comes with operating a business. Every ISP hopes that employees can satisfy every customer so that the top guys never hear about problems. But the folks at Southwestern Bell many years ago figured out that there had to be a way for customers who aren’t satisfied with the routine solution to have an outlet to be heard.
This story has me thinking about how important the human touch is with customers – having a real person to talk to who can solve a problem. That question was prompted for me when I noticed that Verizon is touting that it has incorporated AI into the customer service process. I have to wonder if AI will be used to tackle problems sent to Mr Sampath’s email.
While big companies can pretend otherwise, we have not yet reached the time when an AI can provide the same quality response as a real person. My gut tells me that it will be a huge mistake for the big ISPs and carriers to take the human touch out of customer interactions. If so, that’s good news for the smaller companies that compete with big ISPs. I foresee that small ISP advertising will emphasize that customers can always talk to a real person.
I also remember the executive hotline at Southwestern Bell in the early 80’s and you are right, receiving one of those messages was not highly coveted. On the other hand, Lowell McAdam, during his tenure as CEO of Verizon Wireless from about 2006 to 2010 had a similar touch point that utilized the “Office of the President” to handle complaints. After VZW bought the cellular properties in east Texas and then bungled the transition badly I called Lowell and was then assigned a contact from that office who got my issues to the right people. I was called multiple times by VZW engineers and asked, “how is your cell service today?” To their credit, they utilized the feedback and made some rapid improvements on the network.
The “Office of the President” gambit also used by AT&T in response to consumer complaints filed with the FCC. A cynical brush off ploy that allowed both to close the complaint file.
I have experienced several customer service events in involving AI. Each time AI couldn’t come close to understanding what my problem was much less giving any reasonable response. When I finally worked through all of the hoops to get to a real person, they could hardly speak or understand English and when we got those communication problems resolved, they couldn’t understand my problem much less give me a cogent suggestion. The simple fact is corporate America holds their customers in disdain. One of my recent experiences involved Alaska airlines and I will never fly them again. Fortunately, there are often other options where a firm has horrible customer service.
And in a market economy, holding customers in disdain indicates something is seriously amiss.
AI is only as good as the prompt writer. We started using our own agent with vapi. In the greating it says it’s a robot and that you can say person or human and be forwarded. it hits APIs in our CRM based on caller ID for information for triage and can open tickets for billing or problem resolution. It’s been well received becaues it’s not just a series of menues and traps. It’s purpose really is to get info faster. For instance, when the call comes in, it hits an API of ours to check service status and if the client’s CPE is online. If they say their internet is down it’ll hit another API which triggers a ping test as well as hits one of our routers to see if there are any open connections for that IP. ie is this bad data in NMS etc. I haven’t added more yet, just baby steps, but done ‘responsibly’ the AI is actually really great.