Customerspective: Change the Channel, Please!

I wrote last week about my horrifying experience with NICOR, our local gas company. Well, I’ve now experimented with some of their alternate channels, and if they’re not as bad as their phone service, they’re certainly nothing to write home about.

Firstly, after writing last week’s blog, I tried to contact someone at NICOR to register my complaints. Looking on their website, a contact us option is not available on their home page. I found it under their residential page – pretty obvious, huh? As good consumers we should know that we must first select the corporate silo to which we wish to speak.

The residential page has three choices under the Contact Us section, an “Emergency Contact Information”, a “Customer Service”, and a “Moving In or Out” option. Pretty clear so far, right? Going to “Customer Service” I saw another plethora of choices:

On one side was a line of text (below). On the other was a picture of a (presumably) helpful NICOR operator, eager to handle my emergency call.

Our customer service representatives are available to assist with gas emergencies 24/7

If you smell gas, or if your service is interrupted suddenly, follow emergency procedures and call us from a safe location.

· Send us an e-mail

· Contact us about moving in or out

· Contact the Nicor companies

Call JULIE before you dig on your property

Selecting the “Send us an e-mail” option finally got me to an e-mail screen. Below the message section of the page was a set of contact information fields. My first thought was “Great! Now I can lay out my issues and have a sufficiently senior customer service manager call back for a potential resolution.”

No such luck. A day later I received back an e-mail stating that I’d have to send my comments in writing to their mailing address. Between the horrible phone service, and the disconnect between their “Send Us an E-mail” application and their service department, I’m pretty sure that their mail handling system will be equally disappointing.

I’ve got to ask myself “What could NICOR do better?” Going by my experience of last week, I’d say the first thing is to fix their customer service staff. Hire more of them, and train them to recognize that the customer is calling to resolve some sort of issue. If that issue can’t be resolved right the first time, it will to cost the company money to try to address it later.

Next, get the wait time down to something approaching reason (1 to 2 minutes). Last week’s wait time was extremely long, and it was doubly frustrating because of the large amount of “dead air” on the line. Every five minutes or so a recorded voice would tell me that NICOR valued my time, and offered the website or a telephone callback to replace my wait time on the phone. Between these messages was nothing – often I’d dial up the volume to the max to try to see if the phone was still live.

Fix the callback option with a specific timeslot guarantee - that the callback will occur during a 30 minute slot starting at a specific time. That way, I can know if it's worth my while to put in for a callback. And don't have your automated system hang up while transfering the call to a live operator (my experience last week)!

If you can’t hire more people to reduce the wait time, at least add some basic background sound or music. And dump the alternate channels offer after the first one or two offers. Instead, provide some sort of estimate on current hold time, and number in the queue.

For the website, it’s also pretty simple. Think about the way people typically interact when they’re on your website and bring the most common actions to the forefront. Provide an account login on the home page. That’ll allow NICOR to differentiate residential from commercial customers and offer them likely choices on the account landing page without requiring customers to self-sort before searching the site.

For the customer service channels, integrate complaint handling so that phone, fax, email, and mail are all routed to an appropriate customer service specialist, and take advantage of the opportunity to turn a negative experience into a positive one. The more hoops someone must jump through just to get questions answered or complaints registered, the more frustration you’ll cause.

Well, that’s it for this week. I’ve contacted the Chicago Tribune’s What’s Your Problem department, and I’ll be contacting WBBM Channel 2 CBS News to see whether this story is newsworthy. And if I hear back from anyone at NICOR I'll be sure to let you know.

Customerspective

voxinc.com

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