How Comcast Sets Its Customer Service Reps Up to Fail

You’ve probably heard the audio by now — eight excruciating minutes of back-and-forth between a Comcast customer who wants to cancel his service without giving a reason, and the customer service rep who digs for one nonstop. If not, take a listen: Curious about what might be going on, management-wise, behind the interaction, I spoke with Frances Frei, a professor and senior associate dean at the Harvard Business School and the co-author of Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business. An edited version of our conversation is below. Aside from the general reaction from the internet – that the service rep is a jerk – I’m wondering what you make of this call. Sure. The public has it wrong, by the way. How? Imagine if I told you that I am the leader of a company and am telling people that customer retention is the future, that it’s the salvation of our organization. I fire up the troops and say, “We are the best and no one should rationally want to leave us. The only thing you have to do is to help people understand we are the best. You have all the facts at your disposal, we are going to give you incentives. I know you can do it – you can turn anyone.” This results in everyone thinking they are better at their jobs when they turn a customer. When I listen to this thing, I hear a guy really trying to please his bosses. I find it reprehensible — there is no way he just made up that this was the right way to behave. He is clearly doing what was asked of him in a vague way: remind people that we are the best, and if you can just get them to talk about why they are leaving, you can remind them why we are the best. Now, was he the most emotionally intelligent person? No, but I would love to know: Where are they sourcing their employees from, and do they have any business to expect people to be both driven and emotionally sensitive? The employee was not set up for success. So what would it look like if he was set up for success? There are some customers who want to leave because they don’t know any better. With that subset, a company would want to do everything it could to keep them. Now, there is another subset that is leaving for idiosyncratic reasons — or no reason at all. I want them to be ambassadors, so I would recommend being as gracious as possible. You can educate the customers who are wrong about an issue, but there is no way this rep received that nuanced message. Do you have a sense of whether the internal tracking mechanisms, having to fill out reasons why people are leaving or that sort of thing, played into what happened at Comcast? I think this guy’s performance was measured not on whether the customer was going to be an ambassador afterwards, but whether or not he got to ring the bell that he converted somebody who wanted to leave. There is a pretty clear performance measure going on behind the scenes. What would a better incentive system look like? They could have easily done it differently, and I am not even sure I would measure on conversions. I would measure on the question, are these customers likely to be ambassadors for our organization at the end of the phone call? That would be the only measure. I am sure it would get more retention than their current system does. How would you measure that? It seems like a harder thing to gauge. Actually, many companies have systems where, for example, they call or email people back and you ask them how they are doing. It’s a very well-understood thing. So when it comes to Comcast – and people tend to hate cable companies more than other businesses – Because of stuff like this. Exactly, and we’ve all had similar experiences. So why wouldn’t they just change the way they handle customer service? In industries like cable, when the customer dissatisfaction is so great, it is because you feel like you are banging your head against the wall. That’s why we often blame the person on the other end of the phone, but I have been in enough of the organizations to know it is not the employee’s fault. But, really, how seriously does the average person really consider an alternative to cable, even if they hate cable? That’s because the cable industry has a long history of no competition, so I think a lot of its profits and customers have been guaranteed. But the industry needs competition like nobody’s business, because in competitive environments, you wouldn’t get away with this. It’s like the old days of the post office before FedEx came along: Because cable has been protected from competition, and it makes them profitable. It makes us have to suffer. It almost seems like the restrictions being placed on customer service reps and others on the front lines are becoming more and more absurd — and aren’t actually helping customers or companies. For example, employees at car dealerships who say they need a 10 on a satisfaction survey or else they’ll be considered to be a failure. It makes me so crazy. It’s run amok. Auto dealers are the most notorious, that if you give us a 5 it’s a pass, if you give us a 4, it is a fail. I had a man from a pest control company that had a guy leave a survey and say, “You might not notice, but I don’t get my bonus unless you check a 10.” Now, first of all, that must mean that the way in which they are doing the survey is the laziest way in the world — and they probably are using them in a really dopey way, too. And the employees are finally the ones who are surfacing it. That is a shameful act on the part of the organizations. In addition, you are not going to get honest feedback. It’s based on perverse incentives, and they’re causing a lot of problems. It’s a caricature. It’s a Saturday Night Live skit. Just stop the madness. Just stop it right now. It sounds like the employees are basically the only way that we understand these major systemic problems with companies — and often at the employees’ peril. Yes, because the experience gets delivered through the employees, we often blame the employees. And if you have a good service experience, you think the employee must have gone to heroic efforts to overcome the system. That variation doesn’t make any sense, and it goes back to job design. Again, these companies are not systematically setting employees up for success. And then they worry about customers complaining on social media – well, they give us no other outlet. Taking a step back, are there any companies that do a really good job when it comes to customer service calls? Oh yes. Just call Zappos. At Zappos, the employees, no matter what your problems are, they will all do a good job. They are not judged by how quickly you get off the phone; they are judged by how good of an experience you have. So why is it that we have call centers that give you the perverse incentive to get off of the phone as quickly as possible, or the perverse incentive of making sure a customer stays, no matter why they’re leaving? Why not be judged for whether customer is deeply satisfied at the end of the call?

How Comcast Sets Its Customer Service Reps Up to Fail

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