We’ve all heard the expression “the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing” – and I suspect you’ve probably experienced a situation more than once in your life where this seemed to be happening.

But what happens if you’re effectively dealing with an octopus that is trying to provide customer service and none of the tentacles seem to be connected to the head?

Well let me take you through a recent customer experience that sure felt like I was dealing with a lobotomized octopus. And hopefully shine a light on some customer experience principles that every organization can benefit from.

And so it began…

I’m an early riser and usually the first one up in my household. Each morning, I go downstairs, turn on the lights in the kitchen and hearth room, turn on the morning news, let the dogs out, get their breakfast ready, brew a pot of coffee, let the dogs back in, grab my laptop and catch up on a few eMails and messages over a cup of coffee before heading out for a run.

The other morning started out normal, and quickly became anything but.

I went downstairs, turned on the lights, turned on the TV and nothing – a message on the screen stated there was no signal.

Hmm, I’ll probably just need to reset something after I take care of the dogs.

And as the dogs raced ahead to the front door, I caught red blinking lights out of the corner of my eye coming from the office.

OK, this probably isn’t going to be good…

I let the dogs out and went back to investigate our wireless router that flashing like the neon “Hot Now” sign at Krispy Kreme.

I unplugged the router and plugged it back in only to be mocked by the same flashing red lights.

C r a p…

I pushed and held the “reset” button on the back hoping for a different outcome – but no such luck, same result – that red-eyed demon just seemed to revel in taunting me.

Ugh…

This thing is the central nervous system for our entire house; Phone, TV, Internet – all down.

But, I still had cell service on my iPhone!

Alright, let’s get this fixed…

Now this wasn’t the first time I’d encountered “technical issues” with my internet service – although it doesn’t happen all that often. The last time something like this occurred however, I’d found that using twitter to send out an SOS to the @ATTHelp team was pretty effective; so, I DM’d @ATTHelp letting them know my internet was down and I needed some assistance.

I quickly got a response from the “virtual assistant” letting me know I was going to be connected with a specialist and to provide them with some additional account info to help things along. So far so good…

About 30 minutes later, I received a DM from an agent that provided me a link that would walk me through some trouble shooting steps.

I followed all the steps and quickly learned that our router was toast; and that I needed to schedule a technician to come out and replace it.

Moments later I received another message and link that provided me some time slots to schedule our service.

Awesome! 8:30-9:30 is open this morning! Saved the day!

I booked my service call and received a text confirmation within seconds!

Man… this was a really awesome experience! We’ll be back up and running in no time with minimal disruption to our day. I was scheduled to attend a webinar at 9:00 that I could probably do on an iPad; and the technician might actually be out of here before my 10:00 Zoom meeting.

I then received another text asking if I would be willing to complete a survey about this digital trouble shooting and scheduling experience. Of course I’ll take that survey! This experience rocked!

I completed the Foresee customer satisfaction survey, giving the experience high marks and went to pour another cup of coffee when I received another text…

“We’re sorry. Our tech is running late and it’s unlikely they’ll arrive by 9:30. If you’d like to reschedule, please reply CHANGE.”

I texted back “How Late?” and immediately received another response…

“We’re sorry but there’s no new information. Need to reschedule? Just reply CHANGE.”

Ugh… here we go. No! I don’t want to CHANGE! Now what do I do?

I got back on twitter and DM’d the @ATTHelp team letting them know the current situation, that I didn’t want to reschedule, and wanted to know if they could give me any idea as to when the technician might arrive.

About fifteen minutes later I received a DM back.

“Just to clarify, did the link let you schedule a same-day appointment for this morning?”

Let me just say this response did not give me the warm and fuzzies. I confirmed that this was in fact the case, and after another 15 minutes or so, another support person DM’d me back…

“Thanks for sharing. Please give us some time to review this info and reach back out.”

About 45 minutes later, I received another DM from a different specialist who provided me a link so we could live chat – I was also provided a toll-free number with an extension for this specific specialist if I wanted to go that route.

This link was not working; and when I called, I received a message letting me know this specialist was unavailable but I could leave my name and number. I sent back another DM letting this specialist know about the technical issue. Only to learn over a couple more message exchanges that this particular service app wasn’t a fan of the Safari browser (which still has 54% mobile browser market share).

Great… just what I need another browser on my iPhone.

Over the next 30 – 45 minutes, I exchanged a few more DMs but was unable to make any progress.

I finally dug up another toll-free number for AT&T internet technical support to see if someone there could tell me anything about what’s going on. After getting through a handful of prompts, I learned that my wait time to speak with an agent would be “more than 30 minutes”; but I had the option of scheduling a call back (without losing my place in line) “between 28 – 35 minutes.”

OK – I’ll get some lunch and get a couple other things (that don’t require being ‘connected’) done.

It’s now a little after 1:00, and I received a call – thinking it might be my call back – and to my surprise it was our technician, Geoffrey. He said he’d just received the ticket and asked if it was really scheduled for 8:30 this morning? He apologized and said he was just leaving his last service call and should be at our home around 2:00.

I then received another text message…

“Good afternoon! Your AT&T technician is on the way. See you soon.”

And then a few minutes later, I received my scheduled call back from the internet tech support line. I let them know what all had happened earlier that morning, and things appeared to finally be on track as I had just received a call from our technician a few minutes ago, and he was on his way.

Geoffrey arrived a little before 2:00 and he was awesome! Dawning a navy bandana mask and KC Royals ball cap he introduced himself, slipped on his disposable shoe covers and quickly made friends with our two Dobermans. I took him to the office so he could check out the router, and he immediately confirmed it was dead.

“I haven’t seen too many of them actually do that” – referring to the blinking red lights from top to bottom.

He said he needed to go back out to his van and he’d be right back with our new router. And, within minutes, he had our new router installed and everything connected, bringing our household back into the 21st century.

After he ran a few diagnostic tests to confirm everything was working just fine, he asked if I had any questions and was off to his next call about 45 minutes after he’d arrived. As he was leaving, he said the number he called from earlier was his number, and that if we had any questions to just give him a call directly. That was an awesome touch!

The following morning, I received an invitation from AT&T to take a short text-based survey to rate our experience with Geoffrey and his ability to resolve our technical issue. Geoffrey received top-box ratings across the board. The fifth question (of six) was an open end that asked that I “Please provide any additional feedback to help us fully understand your experience.”

My response – “Technician was solid. Professional and personable. There were significant gaps in the overall experience (in particular lack of communication from ATT) from the time I set up the appointment – which was scheduled for 8:30-9:30 – and the time when the technician arrived at 2:00.”

Around 4:30 the following afternoon I received two final DMs via twitter from one of the specialists who was assisting me a couple days earlier.

“Hi there, we’ll be contacting you shortly.”

“Good afternoon Woody, we have been trying to contact you, if you still need assistance, feel completely free to contact us back, we’ll be here.”

And roughly the same time, I received a call from a toll-free number leaving the following voice message.

“Good afternoon. This is Brian from the AT&T social media department, I just wanted to know about how you were treated. So when you return, feel free to give me a call back at 800-417-1757. Thank you so much for your time and have a good day.”

And that was that – case closed.

Lessons learned – my 2¢ worth.

Stepping back and looking at our technical dilemma from a distance, most people would say getting technical support on the same day, and having your issue fully resolved within nine hours of first contacting the company is actually pretty darned good. And honestly, I agree. I’ve had to wait WAY longer than that in the past, and I feel we got pretty lucky this particular day.

However, as I kept experiencing gaps across the AT&T customer support ecosystem, I couldn’t help but make mental notes of all of the things they either hadn’t thought of, hadn’t gotten to yet, or possibly weren’t too worried about. And I caught myself thinking that this is yet another example of where employing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach can be a really bad idea.

As someone who has lived and breathed Customer Service / Customer Experience management and measurement for a good part of my career, I kept thinking to myself “someone really needs to take a good hard look at this process from end-to-end and clean it up; they’re so close to having this right. With some additional (albeit nontrivial) refinement, this experience could have been exceptional!“

Let me be the first to acknowledge that I recognize how complex all of this is. There are A TON of moving parts in their process; and frankly, the amount of technology and data being leveraged is pretty amazing.

A number of aspects throughout my experience went extraordinarily well. But it is clear not all of their customer service plumbing is fully connected – or if it is, there are significant delays in when and how their data sync up. And these gaps actually create two separate and very costly problems for the organization.

1)   The customer gets frustrated by their disjointed experience – which could wind up costing the organization a customer. Or possibly worse, if this customer becomes really upset and has the motivation and ability to influence other customers.

2)   Associates are continually put in difficult situations by having to try and service their customers with incomplete information; and they ultimately become frustrated by their inability to deliver exceptional customer experiences – which they’re measured on – and organizations run the risk of losing great customer service associates.

One of the lessons here is that customer experience programs / processes HAVE to be pressure tested from every possible angle and scenario.

This is very time consuming – but very critical! And, the people pressure testing the processes shouldn’t just be the people who designed and built the system. You need to allow actual customers to kick the tires on your new programs and processes and help you identify unforeseen gaps – trust me, they will definitely find gaps you hadn’t envisioned.

For example, the first text I received notifying me that our technician was running late and unlikely to make it to our home by 9:30 left me unsure as to what my options were other than texting back CHANGE to reschedule; or maybe just crossing my fingers and hoping that their message didn’t mean that our service call was cancelled. I was left wondering if the original technician was still coming? Were they assigning a different technician to us? Would someone still be coming today at all?

Another lesson is that when you set expectations, and then change things on your customer, it is incumbent on you to quickly and clearly reestablish new expectations.

Throughout this experience recovery stage, it is critical that you over communicate, keep your customer informed, reassure them that they are a priority, and that you’re on top of the situation.

I have to believe that I would have viewed my day quite differently if the first text message I’d received had just a little more information or functionality – such as:

1)   Stating a new estimated time of arrival for our technician, or

2)   Giving me the option to select from some new appointment windows, or

3)   Providing me a phone number that will be answered by someone who has all of the information in front of them and has the ability to get everything back on track.

The biggest take away however is that exceptional customer experiences don’t just happen on their own.

The very best customer experiences are always very well thought-out, designed, orchestrated, monitored, measured and continually refined interactions. 

Organizations that consistently deliver the very best customer experiences have unbelievable customer-centric and experience-focused cultures. All of their strategies and initiatives are completely aligned with the goal of not just meeting, but exceeding their customers’ needs and expectations. And when they consistently do this over time, these organizations gain an incredible (nearly impenetrable) competitive advantage known as fiercely loyal customers and brand evangelists.

And who doesn’t want to have an impenetrable competitive advantage these days?