"We are not entirely certain why it went down, but what we saw in our numbers is that right after the merger was announced, it dropped, then bounced back up in pretty short order," he says. "Our best guess is that what was happening is that they were getting a lot of calls from customers asking about the merger, and the context was something the customer service reps were not prepared for. They weren't prepared for the volume, and they weren't prepared to answer the questions."
By contrast, Verizon saw an uptick that coincided with its offering of the iPhone and the relative simplicity of that product.
What about banks?
Banks have a unique set of challenges, in that they need to strike a balance between offloading routine inquiries to an automated system and providing on-demand assistance.
"I think people are generally less forgiving when their money is involved," Leppik says. "There is a certain amount of urgency. There are a lot of routine transactions that are very easy to self-serve, then, every now and then, you have something which, at least in the customer's mind, is a real crisis.
"There is a myth in the customer-service business that there are some customers who are only going to be happy if they can deal with a person," he adds. "I think online banking is a great example of how that is really not true. For basic transactions -- checking your account balance, finding out if a check has cleared, that sort of thing -- people really do prefer an online channel. It is easier, quicker and you don't have to wait to talk to somebody."
The point of failure is when banks get "into the mindset that when a customer picks up a phone and calls them, they need to try to keep them away from a live agent," he explains, adding that this backfires when a customer has already had a service failure and needs to escalate to live assistance.
Bank of America and Wells Fargo had better phone-based customer service than Chase and Citi, according to an October survey by Vocalabs. In telephone interviews conducted immediately after a customer-service call, 68% of Bank of America customers surveyed were "very satisfied" with the experience, while 63% of Wells Fargo customers gave the experience their top rating. This compares with the 56% of Chase and 52% of Citi customers who were similarly satisfied.
Problem resolution is an issue industrywide, the study found. Bank of America, Chase and Wells Fargo were statistically tied, with 64%, 66% and 64%, respectively, of customers' problems resolved on the customer-service call, while 57% of Citi customers surveyed reported their problems were solved.
"Even among routine transactions like checking account balances, over 30% of the customers we interviewed did not get what they wanted on the customer-service call," Leppik says. "Our survey shows that problem resolution is a major driver of business goals like customer loyalty. It also costs a lot of money to serve customers who call back multiple times.
"Many companies have this mistaken notion that providing good customer service is necessarily more expensive than what they are doing today," he says of call center service in general. "We find there are a lot of companies who are providing very inefficient customer service. They end up spending too much money to provide a poor level of service. The key really is to pay attention to the right things, to incentivize the right things, and they can often provide better customer service for comparable amounts of money."
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