A Ukrainian mobile operator MTS amazed me with a good quality of their customer service.
Indeed, MTS has a feature that matches closely something that I had imagined once.
This feature is about giving to a customer the ability to call right after an episode of customer support and to give evaluation or opinion about the company, about its services or about customer support.
During my Swiss time, I remember being frustrated by useless multiple calls to a customer support of a company. Which one was it? Can not tell it right now, but I do remember some frustrating episodes. Like for instance the one with Apple Europe which had a customer support office in Belgium. The office was stuffed with socially challenged, almost retarded individuals, who would talk to you as if they where in their urban milieu and who would never ever understand anything of what you try to explain them.
Similar situation was with many other companies. I attribute this to the difficulty of recruiting good people, read intelligent people, to a job without prestige or perspective in a Western Country..
I remember calling to a customer support at Orange Swiss and trying to explain that I needed to activate a redirect for mobile phone number because I just lost the phone and needed to keep receiving calls before I can renew the number. The first customer service representative was not getting what I was explaining. He would suggest me to activate redirection on my phone. He was not getting that I lost the phone and did not have it. I tried to call another time to get other representatives, and even applied practice of selecting German as support language. In Switzerland you have choice between French, German, Italian and English. In many other cases, it worked as I would get a German guy/gal speaking at least English and with a better work ethic and higher intelligence. But not in the case with Orange.
So I called 5 times to 5 different representatives. 4 of them, did not understand what I needed.
I imagined a customer support feature where right after the call, you can dial some number and give an evaluation of the services or, most importantly and most effectively, to the customer support representative. In fact, such feature would help to identify quickly and to eliminate the complete idiot. The idiots do not help. In some cases, you can recruit idiot if you find no smart guys for the job. But not in the customer support. It does not work there. The frustration and alienation, the damage to the image of the company can enormous, gigantic.
Similar feature now exists in MTS a Ukrainian branch of the Russian mobile operator with the same name. The Ukrainian branch by the way beats the Russian company in many areas.
So, I called today to discuss receiving detailed phone list by email every month. During the conversation with the customer support representative, I realized that the procedure that she described to me had potential privacy breaches. I told so to the customer representative, but she would just repeat her mantra. Without being really annoying. I though that I might want to call someone in charge by the lack of time dismissed it right away.
Surprise came a minute after I hang off. Indeed, I received a call from the automatic voice response system. The recording guided me with multiple choices to a possibility to evaluate privacy and exposure to a potential privacy attack from outside. I pushed the required button to indicate there was indeed an exposure. Well done, MTS.
I think the customer support girl had a button, a big red one in front of her, which she pushed as she understood that I was not happy with something. Good for you, MTS. Good for you, the customer representative.
Spent 20min of my time. Uncovered large layers of untapped unused experiences from the past. And thoughts about how to fix the world. Also from the past.
A rent, a blog post, a personal one. I need a section “blog” on this Akreatika site where such posts would fit better.
