I’m a bit of a nut when it comes to customer service.
So, you can imagine my annoyance when I regularly receive subpar service from entities dedicated to supporting military families – like the medical clinic and other on-base services, and government-selected moving companies to name a few.
Studies show that 8 out of 10 consumers will stop doing business with a company if they’ve had a negative customer experience. But what happens when those customers have no choice but to do business with that organization and customer retention isn’t an issue? Does that mean they should no longer care about their customer experience? NO WAY! But I sometimes feel that these agencies take advantage of the fact that they have a captive audience, and slack-off on service.
It is true that in many cases, we as military dependents don’t have a choice in whether we want to do business with these organizations or not. For example, if the moving company assigned to manage our PCS won’t return our phone calls or is delayed in picking up our home goods, I can’t just pick a new moving company!
Similarly, when I have to call three times, wait on hold, and then loop through a never-ending phone system for 15 minutes before reaching the right person to schedule a doctor’s appointment, I can’t just go to a new doctor without significant time or personal expense.
Don’t get me wrong, I am very grateful for the benefits we receive. However, it would be nice if those benefits were more regularly packaged within a better experience!
Now I’m not suggesting they roll out the red carpet for me or deliver me a truly VIP experience, but there are some easy, foundational changes that these organizations can make to improve our experience.
Expand communication methods
As consumers, we are accustomed to communicating across various digital communication channels, including chat, email, texting, social, mobile apps, and more. We expect to have the flexibility to be able to do business on our terms via our preferred communication methods.
However, most of these organizations continue to only provide support via the voice channel. At the risk of playing into the millennial stereotype, I hate picking up the phone to call an organization, or worse yet, answer a call from a number I don’t recognize…and forget about listening to voicemail (gasp!)!
I prefer the flexibility of texting or emailing, so why aren’t more of these organizations offering this? I know with certainty these communication mediums can be implemented in their organization fairly easily leveraging the same technology providers they are currently using for their phone systems!
Additionally, if these new communication methods are offered, they should make sure to utilize them effectively. There are a couple organizations – notably the medical clinic which uses the RelayHealth Portal – that offer secondary means of communicating, but don’t empower users to execute the most important and common tasks via that mechanism. I can message back and forth with a nurse via the portal, but if I want to schedule an appointment – which is arguably the most frequent item they communicate with patients on — I still must suffer the pain of calling in.
Improve phone experience
With the technology available, there is NO reason why any caller should have to sit on hold for more than a couple minutes. But nonetheless, I’ve sat on the phone for 30+ minutes on more than one occasion. Again, there are very simple tweaks they can make to their existing call routing system to offer things like virtual hold, allowing the system to keep my place in queue, and enter a phone number where the system can automatically call me back when an agent is available.
This isn’t an expensive or complicated change, but would transform my customer experience. I’m a working mom – do you know what I could do with 20 minutes instead of waiting on hold?! Fold laundry, put away clothes, cook dinner, send 10 emails, solve world hunger…shall I go on?
Implement a quality program
“This call is being recorded for quality and training purposes.”
That message is an indication that the company has a quality management program in place. You know you’ve heard it a million times before when interacting with private organizations, but I bet you haven’t heard it when interacting with the organizations supporting military families!
Quality management programs are an incredibly important mechanism for leaders within an organization to assess the customer experience, identify pain points, determine the training and coaching needs of their employees, and much more. However, if there is no quality management program in in place, most organizations are flying blind as it relates to their customer experience. Thus, these organizations could reap HUGE benefits from implementing effective quality management processes.
ACT based on service feedback
The only thing worse than receiving bad service from an organization is constantly completing a feedback survey from them, and STILL getting bad service. The fact that many of these organizations send me a feedback survey via snail mail or email demonstrates that they at least care about customer experience a little bit! But if they are getting the feedback, why doesn’t anything ever change?
These organizations are presumably experiencing a disconnect between gathering the feedback, and then analyzing and taking tangible action based on their findings. This may be because of a lack of technology to gather and analyze it, or limited resources to make the change. Regardless, it would go a long way to rebuild customer trust if they could demonstrate at least some actions they’ve taken as a result of the solicited feedback.
Service matters…
The organizations that service military families operate differently from private organizations and are lucky they have a captive customer base that they don’t have to worry about retaining. However, customer retention aside, continuing to deliver bad customer experience could have negative long-term effects. One common reason why active duty servicemembers leave the military is because they want to make life easier for their families.
Usually we think of that as not having to deploy away from or constantly relocate them, but I believe that it also has to do with making their lives easier as a whole. All these little negative customer experiences we have as military dependents add up and make for a cumulative negative experience for our families that could potentially trigger a decision of not wanting to “deal” with it all anymore! Thus, while these organizations do have a captive audience, there could still be negative repercussions in the long run.