Category: Frustration

Open Letter to the NJ Department of Labor: Division of Unemployment

***Back to Voice of the Customer later this week – my job for the past couple of weeks has been trying to get my unemployment payments sorted.***

I allude to this below, but want to put it here so that it is very clear: this is not AT ALL about the people doing the frontline work to get claims processed and payments certified and directed where they need to go. As far as I can tell, all of those people are doing everything they can to make this as painless as possible.

Hi, Division of Unemployment [I like to keep things friendly and casual if I can] – I’ve been trying for the past few weeks to navigate the Kafkaesque process of getting the money due me. And based on your Twitter feed and the posts on Reddit (look for [New Jersey] in the post subject) , I am far from alone. But this is not about that.

I get that the system is completely overwhelmed by the sheer volume of claims. I understand that things might take longer to process than they normally would. I am not surprised  when the system crashes on occasion. I think that responding to incoming emails with a potentially useful form reply is actually a great idea – those replies are well-crafted and contain lots of good information. BUT.

Those prefab emails, while they will be useful to lots of people, don’t contain the answers to everyone’s questions. To send those emails from an address that doesn’t accept follow-up questions is so incredibly frustrating and rude. To add insult to injury, the particular issue I am experiencing* is not listed anywhere in any of the FAQs or instructions on the NJ DOL website. But every time I send an email, I get another useless-to-me autoresponse, with no way to actually connect with a human who might be able to help me.

I’ve also tried to call [pause for laughter], and have been unable to get through. This is not unexpected, and I’m not upset that I’m among the many, many people who cannot get through. Really and truly, I do understand the magnitude of the situation and the limited resources of the DOL. What does upset me is that, after I listen to the unnecessarily lengthy recorded message recommending that I file my claim online (I did), assuring me that the DOL is doing everything they can to support unemployed workers, and so on and so forth, I am transferred to a message that says – no matter what time I call during your business hours – “Welcome to the Reemployment Call Center. Due to the high volume of calls waiting, we cannot take your call at this time. If you need to speak with an agent please call back on the next business day.” Are you kidding me with this???

First, what I think you mean to do is thank me for calling, not welcome me to you hanging up on me. I know it’s a little thing, but honestly, it just rubs me the wrong way, and I’m pretty sure you don’t want to be irritating people more than you have to right now. Second, and more important, how is it possible that between 7:39 and 7:40, which is when the message changes from “we’re closed” to “call back tomorrow”, that you have received so many phone calls that you know for sure no one will be available to talk to anyone else until tomorrow? Are you making people hold all day? Because that is not something I’ve seen commented on and I’m pretty sure it would have been, given how distraught people are from not being able to get answers from your department. Is there no hold queue at all? If that’s the case, then people should be trying to call throughout the day, not pushed off to the next day. I understand that you may be trying to control volume that way, but come on. Don’t make spurious claims that no one will be available for a full 24 hours when you and I both know that’s not true.

Listen, I’m not expecting miracles here. It would be really great if I could get paid the amount you’ve told me you’re going to pay me. It would be acceptable if you would just tell me why it’s not happening yet. It would even be understandable if the answer is “we don’t know what’s causing this, but we’re working through claims with this issue, please be patient.” What is unacceptable is that this is a known issue that remains unaddressed in any form on your website, and that those of us experiencing this issue have no way to actually contact a real person to find out what is happening. There are other large blocks of claimants with different known issues that are encountering similar frustration, too.

The system that you have set up to deal with this crisis is isolating, uninformative, and discourteous. You are doing not only claimants a huge disservice, but also your employees, who by all accounts are working very hard and moving things along as quickly as they can. I urge you to take a look at the systems you have in place, and work to make them as user-friendly as possible. Here are some suggestions:

  • When you see hundreds or thousands of people asking about the same issue, add that issue to your FAQ, even if you don’t have a definitive answer. Don’t just pretend it’s not happening.
  • I read that one of the stumbling blocks to hiring more people for processing is that claim information is sensitive and the systems are difficult to learn. That’s not unreasonable. What you can do is free up people who know how to handle those systems for more processing/fixing of claims by hiring frontline customer care workers who can answer emails, direct people to the information they need, and offer reassurances. It’s likely that there will still be a percentage of incoming emails that needs someone with access to the system, but if you set up a multi-tier support system (think tech support!) you’ll relieve some of the pressure on  your top tier people while providing better service to claimants.
  • When a claim or certification triggers a message that indicates the claimant needs to speak with a person (mine says, “If you do not know why your claim is not payable, please call your nearest Reemployment Call Center”), instead of throwing them into the pool and making them try get through to you against astronomical odds), let them schedule a call or at the very least, schedule one for them and let them know when to expect the phone to ring.
  • Better yet, open up a live chat system, just for the people getting that messaging from the system. If a chat takes more than a few minutes, or the issue is one that can’t be easily handled and/or explained, that’s when you refer it to your top tier claims people. Ideally, by scheduling a call or forwarding the chat transcript to the upper support tier for an email followup, not by telling them they need to call in via the overwhelmed phone lines.
  • Finally, fix your language. Don’t welcome people in the same breath you tell them you’re unavailable. Don’t tell the governor that all of the people not getting paid yet are the self-employed folks waiting for PUA – something that is patently untrue. Either answer everyone on Twitter, or ignore everyone – don’t pick and choose based on the positivity of the comment.

Thanks for reading, and considering how you can best serve the people of New Jersey. Please feel welcome to reach out if there is anything I can do to help you out with providing great customer care to your claimants.

*The issue I’m experiencing is that my claim has been approved and I have been assigned a weekly benefit amount, but every week when I certify I receive a message that my “claim is not payable at this time.” I have no appointments or interviews outstanding, nor have I been contacted about adjudication. Hundreds of other people seem to be experiencing the same issue. It’s pretty clearly systemic, which is not unreasonable, but it’s not being addressed anywhere, which is most definitely unreasonable.

If you made it this far, you deserve a cat gif. Looks like this one is hoping to get a live person on the phone at NJ DoL.

Stop, Collaborate, and Listen

When your company launches a new promotion or marketing campaign, how involved is your customer care team? What about when they make changes to the UI or product features? It seems to be a very cultural thing…at some companies, someone from customer care is involved in all marketing/user/product initiatives from the get-go, while at others it’s the customers themselves who end up telling the CSRs that a discount is being offered or a product has been changed, and of course there are many companies that are somewhere on the spectrum between those two extremes. I’ll bet you can guess where I stand.

At a previous job, we had a sign on the customer care department door that said, “Remember, if it touches the customer, it touches us (but not in a creepy way).” It was our lighthearted way of reminding the tech and marketing teams that not only did we have valuable information to share with them about the customers, but that we needed to know what our customers would be experiencing in order to provide them with the best possible service.

Sharing is caring.

I have also worked at companies where everything is done very secretively, so when customers would contact us about a promotion that wasn’t working or a feature they couldn’t find or get to work properly two things would happen. First, we would sound like idiots, denying that we were running that promotion or had that feature. Then, provided with evidence from the customer (or, occasionally, being overheard by a member of the team who implemented the campaign or change), we would have to hunt down the details, sometimes learning new product features or layouts on the fly so we could teach them to customers.

Which do you think resulted in happier customers and happier CSRs? To provide the best possible customer care, someone from your customer care team should be involved in processes and planning meetings from the beginning. We can pinpoint where customers are going to experience pain, and suggest ways to minimize those pain points. Even when there’s no way around a certain amount of customer angst, having your customer care team involved from the beginning will ensure that they are able to guide the customer through the issues that arise as smoothly as possible.

Sorry if I earwormed you with that title…here’s the video so you can sing along to the whole song:

You’re welcome/I’m sorry.

Soylent Green May Be People but Corporations Aren’t

Not many things feel less sincere than an apology from a corporation. It’s true in PR, and it’s true in customer care. It can be tempting to hide behind the safety of your company with a lot of “we” language — placing the blame on the impersonal behemoth. It’s especially tempting in customer care because whatever has gone wrong for the customer probably is not your fault, and may not even be in your control to fix. But, part of making that connection with the customer is apologizing to and sympathizing with them.

This doesn’t mean you should only ever use “I” instead of “we” in your communications to customers. In fact, there are a lot of times when you’ll be speaking as the company, and that’s totally fine. The key is to pinpoint those moments when you can build a personal connection with the customer. It seems like a little thing, but it can have a huge effect on how a customer perceives their treatment.

For example, take a look at these two delayed shipping emails:

Email 1: Unfortunately, we will be unable to ship your order until next week due to inclement weather in our area. We anticipate shipping your order by Wednesday, January 17th. You will receive an email with tracking information when your order has shipped. Please accept our sincerest apologies for the inconvenience.

Pretty cold, right? And why can’t this big “we” ship my stuff out on time, anyhow? Amazon always ships my stuff the day I order it!

Email 2: I’m so sorry! We’re having a bit of weather here and as a result our shipping schedule has gotten backed up, but we should be back on track early next week. I took a look at your order and it should be going out Wednesday (January 17th). We’ll send you an email with tracking information when it ships. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if there’s anything else I can help you with, and again, I am so sorry for the delay!

It’s still the corporate “we” who has made the decision to shut down shipping, and who will be sending the package and tracking info…but now I have a buddy there who is looking out for me, who actually feels bad that I’m not getting my package on time. I mean, I totally understand that things happen. We’re all only human, right?

Putting a human face on when a screw up or delay happens not only helps the customer feel like someone at the company is looking out for them, but also reminds them that the company is made up of people just like them, who have their back and will do their best to make their customers happy.

 

Be a Bridge, Not a Wall

Contacting a company requires effort. Your customer has to find the company’s contact information, figure out what they want to ask, make the time to email or call. So even customers who are just asking for additional information have already experienced some pain points. Now they’ve reached you. Are you there to help them, or to hinder them?

When I first started in customer care, customer service was often touted as “the first line of defense.” Defense? You’re trying to protect yourself from…customers? That should be the opposite of what you want to do. You want to build relationships with your customers, you want them to join the fold and go forth and spread the word about not only what an amazing product you have but about what an awesome company you are to deal with.

Your customer care department should serve as the bridge that leads your customers in, not the wall that keeps them out.

Your customer care department should serve as the bridge that leads your customers in, not the wall that keeps them out. This doesn’t mean “the customer is always right” (a fallacy I’ll talk about in a separate post). It means that your reps need to make your customers feel as if they have an advocate within the company (and your reps should actually be that advocate).

 

It is important to remember, too, that bridges work both ways. If there is information your company needs to make sure customers have, your customer care team should know about it so they can keep customers informed. Sometimes, that will be a policy or technological limitation that will make the customer unhappy. That’s okay. If your reps have built that advocacy relationship with the customer, they will still feel like they are part of the company’s team, and know that you are all working together to make your product or service as great as it can be.

The Case for Dropping the Phone

Not all that long ago, if you had a question about or problem with a product the norm was to call the company. Even when online commerce became common, most companies still provided a phone number in addition to an email address as a way to quickly get in touch. But Amazon, from the very beginning, made it very difficult to find their phone number. They offered extensive FAQs and it was pretty easy to find their email or use their contact forms, but it was very, very difficult to talk to person on the phone.

This was an absolute genius move on their part. Phone calls take exponentially longer to resolve than emails, especially those related to predictable problems. If you can predict — as Amazon could, when they were just in the business of selling books online — the majority of the issues your customers will encounter, you can have systems in place to handle those issues quickly and efficiently.

For example, let’s say I ordered a book from Amazon and it arrived with a torn cover. If I called, there would be pleasantries to dispense with, and then the CSR would have to find my order, and then I would have to describe the damage (which might take awhile, depending on how wordy and/or upset I was), and then the CSR would have to tell me what next steps were, and then I might want to argue, or I might have missed something and need them to explain again, and so on. We close up with more pleasantries and perhaps some small talk about the weather if I’m feeling chatty that day, and that simple return has now taken at least 10 minutes, maybe closer to 20.

That same exchange, conducted over email, would take half that time. Less, once you’ve got a handle on the issue and a procedure in place to handle it. Plus, any promises made by the CSR or requests made by the customer are in writing and easily accessible by all parties. Although there may be some initial frustration to your customers as they are still in the mindset of “talking to a person,” you will be able to quickly demonstrate through speedy resolution that there is no need for a phone call.

The key is that your responses to customer queries do need to be speedy and, even more importantly, accurate. Your CSRs absolutely must read and parse what your customers have written. They must know the questions to ask to tease the information they need out of your customers quickly and efficiently. With the right CSRs and the right procedures in place, you will save both your company and your customers time and money by making email your primary communication tool. Everybody wins!

It May Be Worth 1000 Words, but You Shouldn’t Need That Many

Want a quick tip that will ease customer frustration and increase CSR efficiency at the same time? Don’t make your customer jump through unnecessary hoops.

I recently ordered a kit that was comprised of several pieces. When I received the kit one of the pieces — a fairly distinct item — was missing. I contacted the company’s support through the interface on their site:

I received my order, but it is missing the XXXX. Could someone please send that out to me as soon as possible?

I also included my order number and mailing address, because as a customer I try to make the CSR’s job as easy as possible. This is the reply I received:

We appreciate that you have brought this issue to our attention and I am more than happy to assist you. Please send me a photo of the items you did receive from this order. 

Once I review your photo, I will be able to provide a swift solution. If you have any more questions, please do not hesitate to reach out.

I’m sorry, what? Why would you ask me to do this? The missing item is not shaped like any of the other items included in the kit, so it’s unlikely that I’m overlooking it or mistaking it for something else. It might be tucked away in some packaging (it’s not — I’ve opened everything up and checked), but if that’s the case then just ask me to take a look in whatever box it’s usually found in and follow up if it’s still missing. And if I’m lying about not receiving it and trying to scam another one for free, well, I’d just leave it out of the picture, wouldn’t I?

In other words, the only purpose this photo request is serving is to delay fulfillment of my order and increase my frustration. It’s also adding extra steps for the CSR, as they have to have this back and forth with me instead of just generating an order for the missing piece to be shipped out.

Don’t get me wrong: there are times when you do need a photo. If someone claims they received a damaged package, for example, you might want a photo so that you can see where the packaging failed, or if you’re dealing with a customer who often claims damage it’s not out of line to ask them to prove the damage with a photo (though do be careful not to accuse them of anything — you’re still on their side, you just want to figure out why things so often go wrong for them). 

The bottom line is, make your process as easy for your customer (and your team!) as possible. You’ll ease frustration on both ends and create customers who talk about what great customer care you offer instead of former customers who warn people away.

The FAQ: Customer Care’s First Line of Defense

Roller coaster

One weekend this past fall I was planning to take my daughter and her bestie to an amusement park. It was Halloween season, so the park basically turns into a giant haunted house, which is not my particular cuppa. But, it is totally theirs and we have passes so it’s not like it cost me anything to get into the park and so off we went. I figured I’d just connect to the park Wi-Fi and get some work done, but then it occurred to me that I hadn’t noticed on previous visits if they even had park Wi-Fi. Surely the park’s website could fill me in! Their site’s UI is not great, but it’s not awful. I can navigate around it fine, even though some stuff isn’t where I’d put it. Most of the items under Plan Your Trip have very little to do with planning your trip and more to do with park operations
— not great customer experience design, but let’s put a pin in that for now — so I start there. Nothing under Park Services,  nothing under Tips for Family Fun. They do have an FAQ…surely other people ask this relatively frequently*? Apparently, judging by the content of the FAQ, not as often as they ask if laser pointers are permitted.

Wait, what? It is 2018. No one has asked about laser pointers in the last decade at least, and probably ever if you’re being really honest with yourself, Amusement Park FAQ Writer. (Except maybe for this gal:

via GIPHY)

People are also probably not asking if they can bring their selfie sticks, they’re just going ahead and bringing them, causing jams in the security lines.

selfie stick

Which brings me to my point:

The FAQ is for Frequently Asked Questions, not for Questions We Wish Customers Would Ask.

If it was, we would call it a QWWCWA and let’s all be glad we don’t have to try to pronounce that.

It is totally fine to have your company policies on the website. I would encourage it, even. But that is not the function of the FAQ. Your FAQ should be a living document, changing often to reflect…wait for it…questions your customers are asking frequently.  If 30% of your incoming customer inquiries are asking what your hours are, put that in the FAQ. If no one asks but people keep showing up or trying to contact you an hour before you open you don’t need to put your hours in the FAQ, you just need to find the underlying issue and fix it — those people aren’t visiting your FAQ anyhow.

Once you’ve added a piece of information to your FAQ, it doesn’t just live there forever now. 

( via GIPHY )

Most of the time, questions are being asked frequently because your customers aren’t able to find information where they expect it. Take a look at your analytics, ask your peers (and maybe even your friends outside the company) and try to pinpoint where the disconnect is. Let’s go back to business hours. Maybe you have them on every page, but they’re at the bottom and tiny. Or maybe you put them in the About Us section or the Contact Us section, but people aren’t clicking through to those pages. 

Fix that problem.

Make the text bigger, or move the information to your front page — use whatever feedback you’ve gathered and make it easier for customers to find what they’re looking for. Maybe, in our hours example, you even want to add a menu item called “Hours” that literally just goes to a single page with the hours on it. 

Once you’re pretty sure you’ve fixed the problem (calls have slowed down, analytics show people are clicking where they need to click to get the information, etc.), turn that FAQ item off. If you don’t see a big uptick in related customer queries, related to that FAQ item, congratulations! You’ve fixed the problem. If you do get a big uptick that holds steady for more than a couple of days, turn the FAQ item on again and try something else to solve your problem. It is important that your FAQ be a living document, reflecting the questions that are actually frequently asked. If you never remove information from this page, over time it will begin to bloat, making it difficult for customers to find the answers they are looking for. Not only that, you run the risk of the information becoming wildly outdated. You know what’s worse than customers not being able to find the answer to their question? Customers finding the wrong answer to their question.

Do your customers, your reps, and your business a favor: make sure your FAQ is truly useful to customers, and use the information in the FAQ as a starting point for determining which customer pain points you need to prioritize fixing.

*A quick Google later confirmed that yes, Virginia, lots of people want to know if there’s Wi-Fi here. And, sadly, that there was no Wi-Fi.