I was struck today by an article that I read over at the Sydney Morning Herald – you can find it here. Let’s be honest – I don’t usually spend my mornings trolling Australian publications for news on our industry, but a friend sent this piece over and it definitely resonated with me.

Essentially, Australian telcos are dealing a federal inquiry into their customer service performance. Faced with a rising torrent of complaints associated with poor customer experiences, ridiculous hold times, and low success metrics, the government is attempting to determine what can be done to improve performance.

The telcos (as the article notes) are using this investigation as an opportunity to discuss about how hard things have gotten in their industry – with submissions noting that “it was hard to maintain good service when there were more products, services and bundles than ever before, and even suggested customer expectations were too high or that customers used complaint systems to get free phones”.

This sort of conflict is at the core of what we, as a company, hope to address. Obviously, there are some issues (e.g. customers using complaint systems to attempt to get free phones) that are simply a function of operating a large business in the telco space, and are going be with us forever. But when companies talk about the pressures of operating effective customer care services around increasingly complex products and relationships, this is where we can make a difference.

The beauty of our system is that it provides a uniformity of response and seamless experience throughout the customer’s call. This makes things significantly easier on the customer – rather than having to rely on an agent remembering each and every technical detail of a device, or having to jump repeatedly between agent and IVR – our system creates one consistent experience with a single voice, doing so with a pleasing, human-like conversation. It’s about “customer care”.

We definitely wish the Australian telcos (and their governing body) well in working to improve customer service for the citizens of that country – their struggles are symptomatic of larger issues facing our industry, and we’re hard at work here trying to solve them!

Mike I.
CEO, Interactions