A recent experience with a telecom co. brought back memories from my Credit Card days.
A customer issue is raised and gets escalated to the corporate team. The corporate team looks at the data (across systems) and decides to waive certain charges or settle the “issue”. Customer gets a promise from the manager at the corporate team and believes that all is well. But rarely so – the outsourced collections team calls up the customer – as they are NOT on a real time connected status. Customer records are sent to these teams on a batch basis, without a clearly defined process for update/recall.So what really happens is that this collections team will follow up again and repeat the same story to the customer that they have been doing in the past. The customer in turn would believe that the company has lost it and would raise hell, along with shifting his relationship to another brand.
What is usually the problem is not the intention or the motivations of the service providers, but the technology/process which is implemented. It is rarely done with the customer at the centre- such instances are considered one-off and not coded for. A big mistake for the current Telecom biggies, with lakhs of customers, thousands would fall in these “one-off” processes every month. wake up and ensure the customer commitment is delivered across all teams (inhouse or outsourced) and for all scenarios.