Breaking Free

My father-in-law died last November, and his pension was supposed to continue to his wife, my mother-in-law. No checks came until January. She deposited that check, and it quickly was sent back to the bank marked in big red letters “CANCELLED” - and her account was debited that amount, and of course was thereby overdrawn, with a bunch of charges. It took a couple of weeks and several phone calls to find out (by this time it was mid-March) that they had her as being dead, too!! The Customer Service Representative who was on the line had researched it, and came back on the line saying, “Mrs. Wright, are you still there?”

That humorous question at least tempered the moment.

She told us that the checks would be issued immediately, and the April check would be direct-deposited by April 3. Well, by Monday of this week (April 7), there were no checks, no direct deposit. Fortunately, there was a little life insurance, so at least she’s not broke (yet).

So, back on the phone I went with yet another Customer Service Representative. I realized I needed to assert myself, so I immediately let him know that this had to be the last phone call on this matter. He was very helpful, and I was on the phone for about an hour while he thoroughly researched the entire case. He explained some reasons for the delay, which sounded reasonable, and he assured us that the checks will be issued very soon, and direct deposit will begin in May.

We’ll see…

Well, as CEO of Covenant Eyes, one of my goals is that people should only have to call one time, for any question, problem, or suggestion. Occasionally, one of our members starts out a conversation a little irate. After my experience, I understand why… we have come to expect bad service and multiple phone calls, and after 5 or 6 calls, I get irate, too. So why not just be irate on the very first call, and maybe you won’t need to call more than once?

We are small enough that I know all of our Customer Service Representatives (I think there are 17 of them, including the email responders), and we stress the need to resolve issues on the first call. Even if the problem is not ours, but a computer issue, our CSR’s try to be helpful, understanding, and caring. They even recognize why sometimes people begin a conversation irate. We are not perfect (yet…) but we try to be.

There are three things you might be further interested in. First, we are working to cut down the hold time when people call, even during the busiest times. We have a number of programmers, sales people, and others who started out as CSR’s, and we now have an alert system in place - those others with experience begin taking calls when the hold period gets too long.

Second, it won’t be long before we reach 24 hour customer service. Hopefully by the end of this year, that will be in place. We are considering hiring a couple of British CSR’s for Sunday night through Friday night (daylight hours Monday through Saturday, British time), which in this modern era can be done remotely. We already have one CSR, Keith, in Chicago, while the rest are here in Owosso, Michigan. Keith started here in Owosso with us nearly 8 years ago, went to school in Chicago, and has continued living there, doing our CSR work with VOIP. So it should be fairly easy to continue that practice with a couple of British CSR’s. If anyone from UK knows of someone who might do this, we’d be interested in hearing from you. As for Sunday, we really don’t want to require people to work on Sunday. The way around this is to hire a couple of CSR’s in Australia or New Zealand. We have quite a few members down under, and while it’s Sunday here, it’s Monday there. Again, we’d be interested in getting applications from potentials down there.

Third, we have taken some proactive measures to head off problems for our members. Using our administrative data, we can detect when new signups are having problems, and when problems go on for the first three days after signing up, our CSR’s call them. We recognize the sensitive nature for some members, that they may not want others to know they are using Covenant Eyes, so this is done discreetly. But new members have found this procedure very helpful in avoiding issues, and they appreciate getting the call rather than having to call themselves.

And, by the way, all of our Customer Service Representatives are really, really happy that they haven’t been working for American Airlines for the past week!!