How To Get Better Service From Companies
tips from a data scientist
I realized yesterday, after I posted something on Substack Notes, that I have information many of you might find helpful, gained from my job in data science.
When You Call A Company For Help
Something that likely never occurs to people who work in something other than data science, business analytics, or customer service is just how insanely stupid the metrics are for good service.
Most (supply your own not-alls) large companies only care about one thing—AHT, or “average handle time”. That’s the average length of a call handled by customer service agents at that company. They consider shorter to be better under all circumstances, no matter what. Agents are all tracked on this metric and the metrics are taken very seriously.
The stupidity of this system is obvious: sometimes providing good customer service takes a little time. Believe me, I spend half my time at work explaining in great detail that most people under age 40 solve their own problems via the website or app if at all humanly possible and therefore only call when it’s absolutely unavoidable, which usually means something complicated. With very rare exceptions, nobody cares. All they want is shorter AHT, no matter what.
Yes, this is why agents so frequently put you on hold and why your calls so frequently get transferred or disconnected. The agents are acting rationally and protecting their metrics, sad but true.
When agents are evaluated, which happens quite regularly—sometimes daily—agents with a longer than average AHT are up the proverbial creek unless they have extremely high survey scores. A solid NPS average (which I will explain below) is the only salvation for an agent whose calls take longer than the average for that company.
If this sounds like companies regularly fire their best agents, the ones who solve customer problems and provide good service? Congratulations! You understand the tyranny of metrics.
How to Answer Surveys
If you are asked to rank, on a scale of 1 to 10, how likely you are to recommend a company’s product or service (or how happy/satisfied you are, or one of many other metrics where 1 is low and 10 is high): here’s what your answers mean. They are fed into a formula called NPS, which stands for “net promoter score”.
A 9 or 10 helps the agent. It gets you counted as “promoter”.
A 7 or 8 always hurts the agent a little, sometimes a lot. It gets you counted as “neutral”. Some companies consider the “neutrals” to be low-hanging fruit, customers who are almost promoters, and the agents aren’t punished for a high neutral percentage. But often they are punished for every customer that isn’t a promoter.
A 0 through 6 hurts the agent a lot. It gets you counted as a “detractor”.
Yes, I am saying that if you call and get your problem solved and you’d like that agent to keep their job, you must not interpret and answer this question sensibly. If it’s a product or service that you’d never recommend to anyone because you don’t do that, ever; or because the product or service is one that you’d never tell anyone you use; or for any other reason?
You should still rate the agent a 9 or 10 if they did a good job and you want them to be available the next time you call.
It is probably impossible to exaggerate how closely the human resources of large companies in service roles get tracked and measured. I’ve coded reports that go as far as to rank agents by average length of bathroom breaks. Large companies have telemetry data on their agents that is frighteningly detailed.
Anytime you want the agent you dealt with to be regarded as having done a good job and for your interaction with the agent to help their metrics, do the survey and rate the highest possible score for everything, but especially for any 1 to 10 questions.
I hope this helps you do something positive for the people providing good customer service. Maybe the terrible customer service we’ve all gotten used to in the last few years is a tide that can be turned if enough people understand the system.
How to Underwrite Subscriptions
Several commenters on my most recent post asked me how to underwrite the free subscriptions I offer to people who email me asking for free access. If you would like to do that, you can send Venmo to slytherinbeater. (That’s a Harry Potter house, Slytherin, and a position in Quidditch, the wizarding sport—beater). If anyone wants to do that—thank you!!
Excellent information, Holly. Thank you for taking the time to explain.
Now, if I could just get a human on the other end of the chat/call. I'd lol if it weren't so maddening, the hoops to jump through sometimes.
But not all...just kidding! Great information, and I can attest that the service people in my company (who are only serving internal customers at that) are watched and monitored in basically this same way. The bathroom break time thing, as demeaning as it sounds, is a very real thing.