The presenters were peeved.
One, a frequent flier with two million miles credit from his airline of choice, was confronted by a stewardess. Another took a $250 overcharge while returning a car to an airport rental outlet rather than stay to argue and miss his flight. Both had unpleasant interactions with front-line employees that affected relationships more profoundly than the multi-thousand (and in a few cases, multi-million) dollar systems they had come to tout at the NCDM.
Geoff Ables, principal at Customer Connect, did not feel so constrained. He quite freely indicates that Advantage Rent-A-Car overcharged him by $500 after a two-week rental. An argument with a counterman got the overcharged reduced by half, but staying to press the point would have put him at risk of missing his flight.
Ables ultimately wrote the head of Advantage a seven page letter detailing the problem, noting that he was a business consultant and offering solutions. He also enclosed an invoice for the time spent writing the letter. Ables ultimately received a brief response along with the other $250. The invoice, he notes with a smile, is yet unpaid.
Peter Heffring, president of Teradata, NCR’s CRM unit, was a loyalist to a single airline, accumulating more than one million miles on it. During summer 2000 he was on a nine-day, six-country European business trip. At the boarding gate during the final leg, which was to take him home, he was presented with a coupon he’d earned for an upgrade to business class.
Heffring was settled in his seat, and the plane’s door was closed, when a flight attendant informed him that the gate attendant neglected to take the upgrade ticket. When Heffring reached into his bag to retrieve it, he came up with a fistful of upgrade coupons – many of which had expired. Regardless, the flight attendant should have realized Heffring’s value to the airline.
But her training did not include flexibility, and she did not have access to customer data. Instead, she told Heffring that he would have to move to coach even though business class wasn’t full. Heffring offered to buy the upgrade on the spot, but the flight attendant was making it clear that she wanted him to move to coach. Finally she relented, saying, "We will let you sit here, but don’t do it again."
Like Ables, there was a happy resolution – of sorts. Three months after the incident, Heffring presented his experience at a conference, an airline executive recognized his carrier from the route information, combed through his customer database, and verified the incident. He sent Heffring a personal note of apology, along with several upgrade coupons. But the damage to the relationship remains. As a result of the incident, Heffring has split his loyalty among two major carriers.
The original airline, Heffring notes, sends out "tons" of direct mail, but its CRM efforts are missing one vital ingredient. "They have not been able to push intelligence to the point of customer contact," he said. "They didn’t train their customer representatives."
Discontent was not limited to speakers. One attendee, Danielle Alsup, was trying to change the name on an MCI telephone account from her husband’s to hers. The call center rep was not empowered to do so, and during the conversation became audibly irritated. Fed up, Alsup cancelled the account and switched to Sprint.
"People that care about the brand complain. Those that don’t, switch," Alsup said.
Alsup, senior vice president, CRM database manager at PentaMark Worldwide, is used to a high standard. Managers at her company phone in to its call center for quality control purposes. The Troy, MI-firm recently let a service representative go not because he was rude – he wasn’t – but because he did not capture the name and address of a customer calling in with a problem, thereby preventing the company from making a follow-up contact.
Are these picayune examples? Perhaps, but at a conference replete with tech-heavy topics, these in-session examples illustrate that often the parts of a CRM system that are paid by the hour are the quickest to be knocked out of whack.
The NCDM Winter Conference ended Tuesday.
