The Seventh Deadly Service Sin: Causing you significant hassles or damage though system errors
This is part 7/7 on the 7 Deadly Service Sins. Part 6, “Exploiting gaps in your knowledge for profit”, is available here.
In what ways do companies hold their customers hostage, causing moments of tension in crucial touchpoints that deplete the service’s emotional bank account and leave the customer with a negative perception of the organisation? Over the last week, we’ve been discussing the 7 Deadly Service Sins where this scenario occurs.
We finish today with the Seventh Sin of Service:
7. Causing you significant hassles or damage though system errors
Banks. Insurance companies. Department stores, private hospitals, gyms, phone companies, landlords… almost any company, nowadays, that provides credit or an ongoing monthly service to a customer perform a credit check, and submit their data to credit agencies about their payment experiences.
What this means is that companies have unprecedented opportunity to cause significant damage and hassle to their customers, in areas of their life completed disconnected to the service that organisation may be providing. The ramifications of a small systems error by a utilities provider can put your customer’s jobs and livelyhoods at risk:
When Sean Powell started getting demands for £300 from British Gas, he thought it must be a joke for one simple reason – there isn’t a gas supply to his central London flat.
Now, 18 months on, the self-employed property manager is distinctly unamused after the energy giant put a default notice on his credit file – for not paying his non-existent account.
But while such an incident would be a serious inconvenience for most people, for Powell the episode has ended a perfect credit record and thrown his business into jeopardy… – The Guardian
Entire lives can be broken, when companies get the details wrong.
About a year after getting the second mortgage, BofA started notifying George that his payments were late. Soon they jacked his credit card interest rates from seven percent to twenty-eight percent. Next, they ruined his credit record. His Sears card dropped from a $10,000 limit to a $500 dollar limit. Then one day in the fall of 2009, BofA initiated foreclosure on the house he had built and owned for 28 years.
The only problem? The Mahoneys had never missed a single payment on either their first or second mortgage.
… “Banks shouldn’t be allowed to ruin people’s lives this way. My stress level for the past year and a half has been a 10 and my wife is a wreck,” George explained. His wife, Marianne, confirms the toll the trial has taken on the family. “The whole thing is a nightmare. The stress we live under is unbearable and it’s embarrassing too. No one can help us, no one can do anything and it’s ruined our credit. I have always been proud to have perfect credit,” she adds, the strain evident in her voice.
After receiving a foreclosure notice in October, hiring a lawyer to send urgent letters to BofA and even after repeated talks with top-level staff in the office of BofA President and CEO, Brian Moynihan, the Mahoneys are still in jeopardy. – Trapped in Bank of America Hell
If there is one lesson to learn from this, it is that our modern, digital world where cash is increasingly a virtual concept is highly connected. The services we rely on have the ability to harm us.
A credit rating is not the only way to cause your customers severe hassle, either, as many customers of renowned property management company Solitaire have discovered:
Solitaire sent our bills to our neighbours and despite being told on a number of occasions failed to update their records. 8 month later we find out and try to rectify this which took a further 4 months! During which the work we have been billed for has not been done! We then receive a bill with a late payment charge added and threats to take us to court. We begin contesting the charges given no work has been done and within 6 weeks they take us to a debt collectors who then add nearly £150 for their apparent service!! We have received no replies from our numerous letters and have just been infrormed that the debt collectors should have been called off when in fact they did the opposite!! We would have thought twice about buying our flat if we had known what they were like. – Reviewer, Allagents
The very basic customer experience needs to be about building a relationship with your customers, and focussing on being very, very careful with their details.
Many of the Deadly Service Sins have this factor in common. It is often about the small stuff that problems are caused. These are not training issues to make staff more polite. These are about the nuts and bolts of how a service works, impacted by everything from business strategy to operations, which is why the customer experience should not be an issue owned by marketing or sales, but by those who have responsibilities across the company.
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