Last week I told you about my alarm vs. phone company customer experience drama and raised the question of what part of each dollar spent on your products and services is needed to fund your company’s dysfunction.  I bet it’s more than you thought.

To last week’s point, I just received my phone bill.  I usually skim my bills and just pay what’s required.  This time my paranoia of dysfunction got the best of me and I started reading the bill line by line.  The bill was littered with this fee and that fee.  Hard line fee?  Gross receipts surcharge?  Fees that I’m now convinced are disguised to cover the phone company’s dysfunction because they cannot just raise the base monthly cost without everyone noticing.  Then I study the alarm monitoring company’s invoice and try to calculate what the monthly fee SHOULD be – I think I have to pay the fully loaded dysfunction fee of $39 when it should be more like $29 without the dysfunction subsidy.

Is your company so heavily process-reliant that you’ve squashed common sense?  Common sense that’s needed to solve simple customer issues?  Is one department setting up another to fail because of lack of communication or information that then leads to bouncing your call-in customers around without a clear path to call resolution?  Are your analysts running around creating reports that no one is reading when they should be reviewing the company’s speech analytics to uncover the real customer pain?  Continue reading “Just how much customer experience dysfunction am I paying for here?” »