Repeated mistakes drive customers away

Maybe we should occasionally look at the diehards of abysmal customer service to remind us all in business, as we grapple with client challenges, just what it is that alienates customers permanently.
In our antithesis case study, there are certainly some beauties in the ugly parade. But my own list still gets topped by Barclays Bank of Kenya (BBK) #ticker:BBK cum Absa.
I have written often about the bank’s poor debit card service. Yet Barclays has never resolved its card issue.

I don’t believe that’s because BBK, being such a grand and prestigious bank, it is just way too busy sorting other big, important banking matters. Nor is it likely that it cannot fathom the things all the other banks do to make their cards work.

In the end, I think the problem begins with the card’s nature of use. That card works, nearly always, at retail points of sale. It also works 100 per cent in Kenyan ATMs. So for most customers, most of the time, it’s a working card.

Where it fails, extremely frequently, is in online purchasing, and then, fairly often, in foreign ATMs.

So the starting point is that I use it uncommonly. In the main stream it works, but on any minority use, it fails. That makes my experience unusual, and thus my voice insignificant.

READ: When a transaction disappoints the customer

However, there’s a second source, in not ‘owning’ the problem when it does move mainstream.

In this, the ‘lights on’ moment for me was booking a JamboJet flight online with the card last month, which failed.

As I grappled for hours trying to get BBK to release the payment to JamboJet that it had both debited from my account AND given as a failed transaction to the airline, the BBK customer care man told me, with sincere belief: “It’s JamboJet. This often happens. They have a problem with their system.”

I now see how JamboJet might be one of the very few online purchases made by many BBK customers. But my own BBK card has failed across every conceivable website payment system, where my HSBC card has never delivered a dud transaction.

Yet it’s the placing of this minority technical issue inside an environment that is ‘customer careless’ that makes for the final dysfunctionality. BBK’s promise to restore my funds ‘within 30 minutes’ took three more calls over two weeks to get effected. And that’s an ethos, a culture, at play.

Everywhere, businesses hit technical snags. Often, businesses make operational decisions that hurt customers. But where they also don’t care about correction, the customer departure is a done deal.

Indeed, the boundary defined by ‘customer careless’, for me, is epitomised by Jamii Telecom, which actually isn’t always.

When I wrote about a run of home Internet cut-offs - sometimes on a Friday ahead of a closed accounts department all weekend - on its repeated failure to reconcile my account payment to my account: it fixed the problem. It has never happened since. Hats off.

Yet, last month, Friday evening, the Jamii Internet went down. It turned out, three days later, it was a fibre cut. It took four days to fix. Humphrey, on customer care, explained that the technical team was overloaded and behind. It was finally restored Tuesday evening.

My Safaricom #ticker:SCOM bill soared on data use. Yet a previous correction leaves me believing that if confronted with the fact their slow mending cost me Sh15,000 on a Sh5,000 a month account, and that I’m now getting quotes elsewhere for Internet, it will at least review its technical team resourcing and look at adding a technical team to clear the backlog.

The real lesson of these tales is one: those who never ‘own’ a technical issue, never fix it.

It shouldn’t take 1,000 customers complaining every day. If ‘it happens often’, it should be investigated properly, because it may be your fault.