Support: the weak point of business

I've written before about poor experiences with online shopping in SA, and also about the dangers of relying on social media for support, so it was serendipitous that the retail banks stepped in to bring it all together here.

I actually have a great deal of respect for the local banks. Although everyone's got a horror story or two, we have a regulatory regime which protected us from the worst of the global credit crunch, we pioneered early anti-fraud mechanisms for online banking, and we had cool features like printing cashiers' cheques from an ATM decades ago. That last one left my American colleagues in jaw-dropped envy at the time - for a culture which still uses cheques for routine payment, they sure haven't embraced technology very well.

Okay, so we've been tardy in rolling out chip and PIN, and two-factor authentication is still rare. And we all know someone who works in the back office who tells us the scary stories of duct tape and chewing-gum middleware holding it all together, but really, it's not bad.

Banks, like telcos and similar service industries, struggle with support. You're dealing with a lot of very impatient people who often can't explain their problem or their expectation clearly, amid very complex systems (especially with the advent of online transacting).

So I sympathise, but I still expect service, and I'm also fascinated by the interplay of forces which demonstrate a system spiralling out of control.

I'll tell you a story, but put your own organisation into the same scenario and ask yourself whether it would go differently. More specifically, what mechanisms do you have in place to prevent it going that way at all?

There are going to be a couple of key takeaways in here. First, a lot of companies have really terrible support, and the triggers for that can easily be avoided. Second, many companies have grown their product portfolios much faster than their support infrastructure can handle. Third, customers have so much information and communication at their fingertips that the balance of power has shifted sharply in their favour, and the CPA only makes it worse. When everyone knows their rights, you're in for a world of churn.

My bank card stopped working online. That's annoying - no smartphone apps or Kindle books for me - but hardly critical. It still works in shops and ATMs.

I've experienced their phone support before, so I popped into the local branch a couple of times and they promised to look into it. I was told, variously, that the bank "had had Internet trouble, but everything should be okay soon", and that "oh, but everything looks okay. Try later."

In support-speak, those are variations of "please go away, we don't know what to do and we are hoping the problem will just fix itself". IT support engineers will recognise this as the Reboot Gambit.

And there's red flag number one: savvy customers know when your support is out of its depth. Fibbing about it does not make them look competent; it makes them look guilty.

They also promised to phone me back, and didn't, which was a clue that all was not well. So the next time (the card having remained obstinately offline-only), I offered to wait while the clerk called the support line.

Red flag number two: by all means take the problem offline, but if you promise to follow up, do so. Nothing breeds frustration like a lack of communication.

All in all, the clerk made six separate phone calls, each one being transferred between various departments until the number of people she spoke to was probably around 20. At various points, she handed me the receiver so I could explain, often several times, that no, I was not having a problem with Internet banking; no, it's not the wrong kind of card and it actually does (sometimes) work online; and no, I wasn't going away.

The last one was a fib of my own. I gave up at the end of my lunch break, having just been reassured that someone had definitely found the problem and they'd SMS me all the details. Not reassured, I left, and an hour later, I received an SMS inviting me to sign up for telephone banking. Thanks guys. That'll help with Amazon and Google, for sure.

Call centres are where hope goes to die.

Fine, I thought. To Facebook with you, where I posted my dissatisfaction on the bank's page, specifically focusing on my frustrations in-branch, and true to form, received a much quicker response than other forms of support. But the social media rep demonstrated very quickly that he was just one of those 20 clueless agents in the phone chain, asking me a bunch of redundant questions and finally conceding defeat and recommending, "You should visit your local branch where they'll be able to help you." Reading from a script, presumably, and not a very helpful one.

Luckily, another area where at least one of the local banks has stepped up is in online migration. In a matter of moments, I took my business elsewhere. I don't bear a grudge against the old bank; they were useless and I fired them. If anything, I'm glad the experience so quickly identified their inadequacy.

1) South African businesses tend to be terrible at support. Call centres are where hope goes to die. But even if you're incompetent, if you promise to call someone back, do so. The mantra of support is "take responsibility".

2) If even your internal staff can't navigate your support system, you are broken and will be fixed or replaced.

3) Increasingly, frustrated customers are turning to social media, partly to vent, but also because the brands' media teams are more responsive. That's a double-edged sword, because if those teams prove to be as useless as your first-tier support, it can go viral, and not in a good way. So if you're allowing your social teams to make support promises, empower them to deliver. See point number one.

4) Customer churn is easier now than it has ever been before. My situation may have been unique, but if it was a system-wide problem affecting thousands of customers, my grain of sand may have been the first signs of a landslide. The only reason most South Africans don't exercise their consumer rights is because they don't know them. Too many businesses are relying on that ignorance as the last line of defence for their creaking support defences.

Stickiness and loyalty are magic words for brand managers, because they understand that the modern world is all about empowering the customer. Unfortunately, it's specifically empowering the customer to take action against you when you fail.

Many large organisations tell me they have mechanisms and processes in place to address this, but here's the deal: they're not working now, and your consumers are getting more powerful by the minute. Deal with that, or be dealt with.