Why we can´t get customer service when we most need it?

Have you noticed different interaction channels between companies and their customers fail just at the most critical or high access volume time?

How many times have you had to check the road traffic volume? Did you call (or tried to) the concessionaire that manages the highway and only heard a busy tone? Another example, did you try to purchase tickets over the internet for a show or spectacle? How many times the site was so congested that went off-line or just displayed a message to try again later?

Recently, airlines companies could not perform the check-in during the holidays. Imagine the disorder for thousands of passengers / customers, the stress they suffered and negative propaganda that was disseminated by the press.

One of the main reasons for this problem is the lack or bad design of structure (or infrastructure) to support the volume of customer service. If a call center has a peak of 40,000 phone calls per hour, it must scale its infrastructure, servers, network, people and everything to support a volume even higher than that.

But this design has a price, and usually is not low. The worst thing that can happen to a company is to mistreat or serve its customers in order to annoy them. The power of one-to-one propaganda is immeasurable, especially if it´s a negative one.

Usually, people don’t make comments when they are well served by companies; even because this is an obligation. But if they are mistreated, or get bad service, they start to comment and disclose about the problems they had.

Companies invest lot of money in marketing strategies, advertising on TV and / or Internet, mass propaganda and so on. Lot of things to get new customers and captivate the existing ones. But they forget to look their backyard and prepare themselves for the increasing volume of customers and prospects service.

Sometimes there isn’t a good communication between marketing, IT, logistics, shipping and others departments. Someone decides "to save money" on infrastructure or cut overtime or not hire more people to meet the growing demand.

Then the company loses more money, effort and especially MARKET, for failing to adequately meet the needs and requests from their own customers. The strategic planning of a company should be broad enough to cover all the areas involved in customer service; whether through call center, website, e-commerce or live assistance.

The sizing of the customer service should consider the maximum volume of requests at any given time, all the necessary hardware software and people involved in this process. All this based on a history of service, a kind of backlog. We just can’t simply take the numbers of our heads. This study should be based on calculations of average handle time (AHT), network data traffic, Internet, systems integration, number of agents working simultaneously, either via chat, e-mail, telephone or personally.

Like a customer, our responsibility is to assert our rights and claim. Whether through the call center, government agencies, complaints sites and company’s ombudsman. There is a natural tendency of the companies to minimize and hide their lack of customer service.

Like a company, our responsibility is to treat seriously the customer service. Not only invest in marketing and advertising, but in infrastructure structure, training people and hiring of skilled people.


Daniel Itzicovitch