Trust, but Verify

I recently posted a rather intense bad customer story as an example of how failure to plan for establishing appropriate trust levels with customers can be very hard on the bottom line.  It reminded me of another situation from my consulting career where a similar type of situation was occurring, and where it was fixed simply and effectively.  The story was one of a high tech company whose products are quite expensive (each selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars).  Their technical support operation is understandably complex and expensive, since most of the "agents" are highly experienced engineers.

This company wanted to ensure companies who did not pay for maintenance were not able to get free support.  So they front-ended every call into their support center with an entitlement check.  This typically took about five minutes, since the database of entitlements was unwieldy.  Basically, a low-cost agent had to ask who was calling, get some codes, find out the serial number of the product being called about (many customers have mixed maintenance fee situations, depending on the product).  If the customer passed the entitlement check, they were "allowed" through the gate to talk to an engineer.

Think about this from the customer's perspective.  You are a senior engineer trying to get a million dollar system online, probably on a tight deadline.  You are extremely knowledgeable.  You need help, and you know exactly what kind of help you need.  It will take several calls.  Each time, you have to waste time talking to someone who knows nothing and whose only purpose is to verify that you are worthy of being connected.  Sounds nice, doesn't it?

There is a really simple way to fix this, that saves a ton of money and generates revenue as well.  My customer did it in less than a month.  Here is the idea:

Let everyone through, first off.  Front end calls, if needed, with a triage person to figure out who the right engineer is to take the service call.  Let the engineer handle the call, no questions asked.
AFTER the call is done, check entitlements off line for all calls received. When you find someone who got "free support" (one call only!), you do two things.  First, you have your person who used to act as a (depressed) gatekeeper instead act as a sales person.  Have the person call the "offending" customer and thank them for calling you.  Tell them you were to happy to take their first call, at no charge.  But then tell them that future calls will be charged, and ask for credit card information so you can allow them to get the help they need without delays.  And of course try to sell them a long-term maintenance contract.
If they buy a maintenance contract or give you credit card data, you follow up with the necessary paperwork and meanwhile continue letting them through (but you are capturing usage data for credit card billing).  If they decline, then their name, company, phone number and product codes go onto a short list that can be checked automatically on the way in to the triage person.

This company did that, and did generate revenue.  More importantly, in the 90% of cases where the customer was authorized to begin with, the customer experience was much improved (and costs were reduced).

This is a good example of something that is technically simple (not even evolutionary -- they had all the tools they needed except a lightweight database app for checking against the hot list).  But it required a change in the mindset of the business leadership.  It wasn't even hard -- more of a "why didn't I think of that?!" situation.

The issue is that many of these needless, customer-denigrating steps arise from good motives and too little attention to the experience of the customer.  And too little clear thinking about costs and benefits -- sometimes all you need is a quick, back of the envelope calculation to show the "ROI"!

Again, are you proactively planning on how you will manage trust relations with your customers, or are you fulfilling their likely expectation that they will be treated like children or, worse, cattle?

I think many companies have done similar things, so this isn't really any sort of a breakthrough idea, but more of another good example of how thinking flexibly about customer service, and considering trust as a ket variable to take into account – can lead to surprisingly good results with little or no investment.

I find that oftentimes major changes can be made in business results without major IT investment projects. While IT projects are important (and it's what we do at Aria, after all!), it is equally important for enterprises to become agile, and to learn quickly and adapt quickly.

Hopefully this example helps.