When you get a low ROI as a customer
John Hagel speaks a lot about a new type of ROI – Return On Information -, and how ROI needs to be optimized for both the company as well as for the customer. As a company, if you do not know who the top 20% of your customers are who bring in 80% of your profit, you do not have a good ROI.
As a customer, I just experienced some very low ROI situations – which really affect the way I feel about the company.
First was my cellular provider T-Mobile, which I had to call last week as some people with Cingular accounts could all of a sudden not reach me anymore. After going through the usual interactive voice response system “hell” and providing my home number, home address and last four digits of my social security I finally reached a live person, who started the conversation by asking me for my home number, home address and last four digits of my social security. I thought I was going to strangle him and when I asked him why he had to get that from me again since I had already provided all that rich information to their system – he responded that “his” system had no way of knowing that I came from that “other” system…sigh. At least he was helpful, which is sort of surprising with today’s cellular providers.
Next came my buying experience with HP. I bought a new Media Center PC from their online home office store. That went smoothly…registered, used a simple password with all letters, and when I was finished I got a friendly confirmation with a $10 coupon. The problem was that I did not like the monitor choices on their site. In looking around I found what I wanted in their small & medium business online store. So I tried to log in, only to find out that my log-in credentials from the home office site did not work. I had t recreate a new account, and this time I was asked for a password that had to have a combination of letters (with at least one in Cap), numbers or special characters. This one also asked for my mother’s maiden name! When I typed in the discount code I had received from HP (I know, it was the home office store – a different division), it was rejected. On Sunday, when I tried to access that account, I could not. Evidently I had forgotten what password I used, and since I had given a fake maiden name for my mother (that is none of HP’s business), I could not reset my password. Since they were closed on Sunday, I had to wait until Monday to reset my password, which is when my order was scheduled to ship. When I looked at the home office division, they were open on Sunday, but I figured it was not worth the aggravation trying to call someone there to reset my password on the fort knox computer from the small and medium business division….sigh.
How much would it cost them to get systems that are customer centric instead of division centric? And what do you think their ROI (return on investment) would be to deliver a better ROI (return on information) experience for their customers?
Sigh…
[Tags: customer service HP IVR t-mobile roi return on information]
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May 9th, 2007 at 12:55 pm
From a systems standpoint, it’s not always that easy to make two systems talk to each other, or use a centralized, customer-centric system. In many cases, businesses are running newer systems with some form of enterprise/mainframe backend that they push data to and extract data from through a series of batch processes throughout the day.
In your situation, you are dealing with (what appears to be) functionally different divisions within HP, each running under different rules of doing business. I agree however that a web experience should be the same, but this is not always feasible since different divisions operate under different budgets and business climate pressures.
Companies don’t always have the luxury of building a system from scratch that is customer-centric. This is the case with the CRM system and the phone system at T-Mobile as well as the consumer vs. small business website at HP.
The cost of creating a centralized system represents a huge investment in consolidating years’ worth of data from multiple legacy systems into one centralized system. Aside from cost, doing this without interrupting existing business processes with customers is also expensive and timely. In HP’s case, this is an acceptable risk because the top 20% of their customers that bring in 80% of the revenue most likely don’t cross the boundaries between consumer and small business.
Good points nonetheless, and I hope it’s an issue CIO’s and CTO’s address as companies move towards being more customer-focused in all customer touch-points of their organizations.
May 9th, 2007 at 7:26 pm
I agree with you…
The funny end of the story (well at least for now) is that they sent me two monitors, even though my order confirmation clearly shows only one being ordered.
September 18th, 2007 at 6:29 pm
FWIW, I heard TMO dumped their $100M+ multi-year Siebel rocket-ship earlier this year… that was supposed to bring all of this together. Unfortunately, the Biz and IT were never able to get on the same page… primarily due to executives past experiences (AT&T).
Do you know what the #1 application used in a TMO call center? Notepad.