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Customer Retention - old school style
Author: Bill Cusick
August 26, 2005
We help clients increase customer retention in a number of ways, but AOL has taken retention activity to new levels. In fact, if you want to cancel your AOL service, they’ll "help" you in every way they can - except of course by actually cancelling your account.
Just check out the $1.25 million settlement they’ve agreed to because of policies like this:
Customer
service reps could receive bonuses worth tens of thousands of dollars
if they managed to retain half the people who called to cancel their
AOL service. In many cases, customers were retained against their will
or without their consent. AOL frequently ignored requests to cancel its
service and to stop billing them.
Pretty lame. Though I feel a bit sorry for AOL. Once you find out that Eliot Spitzer is sniffing around your company, it can’t be good.
Oh, and if you’re wondering, that’s a picture of former AOL wunderkind Steve Case at the announcement of that monstrously disastrous AOL/Time Warner merger a few years ago. The great business ideas just keep coming for AOL.
Quick hit: calling a customer a “female canine”
Author: Bill Cusick
August 19, 2005
There’s mediocre customer service, there’s bad - almost negligent - customer service. And then there’s this.
Boy, just think of the extra time it took for these guys to go in and change the system so that they really, really insult a customer, and then get themselves fired. Good work!
The benefits of not knowin’ nuthin
Author: Bill Cusick
August 11, 2005
Sometimes, I’m a real idiot.
Funny thing is, it’s a state that I seek out. When we’re on a client engagement trying to help improve customer retention issues, there’s an abundance of industry and subject matter expertise that we bring to the party. With an insurance company, for instance, we understand state regulations, compliance issues, technical concerns, even the interdepartmental big-company political issues. And we can help analyze data, communications and processes with a knowing eye.
But often, the best way to create an "ah ha!" moment of discovery is to act like an idiot. Well, maybe not an idiot exactly, but at least a bit of an ignoramous. Because, if you’re an expert in insurance, you know what a "third party" is to a claim process, and you know who the "insured" is. But a guy on the street doesn’t think of himself as an insured; he’s a customer. And he doesn’t care if the state "promulgates" requirements, or understand that "subrogation" might be a good thing, or a bad thing.
When we approach the experience a company creates for customers (intentional or not) through all of its written communications, and phone interactions and website processes, we try to do it with an innocent eye. After all, it’s only through the understanding of individual human beings (i.e. customers) that any of that stuff matters.
Out there in the Black Hills of Dakota there lived…
Author: Bill Cusick
August 3, 2005
a bunch of buffalo. The Beatles lyric is actually: "there lived a young man named Rocky Racooooooon." On our vacation out west last week, I never hesitated to start singing that song whenever anybody mentioned "Black Hills" or "Dakota," which made me really, really popular with my wife and kids. Oh well, they’re used to rolling their eyes when I’m around.
Our trip started with a jaunt to the Badlands (very cool) followed by Mount Rushmore and the Black Hills. We camped in Custer State Park, which contained miles of rolling beautiful terrain, and enough buffalo (or do you say Bison?) to make your head spin. We were stopped several times in our car to let entire herds wander past.
Then we ventured on to Yellowstone in Wyoming. On the way we passed through Cody (named after Buffalo Bill) and ate at the famous Irma Hotel (founded by Buffalo Bill), drove past the Buffalo Bill Museum, gandered at the Buffalo Bill Dam, and cruised through the Buffalo Bill Cody State Park. That guy was the Trump of the 1890’s.
The kids were not particularly enthused about Old Faithful (which was right on time with its eruption) or the stinky pools of bubbling sulphur water. They enjoyed the hike to the base of a waterfall, and we saw a bear as we were leaving the park, which made the trip for my youngest.
Overall, a goll-dang fine trek.
