News and notes from around the interweb:
- Be sure to leave a quick comment to enter to win a 3-night 3-bedroom luxury apartment stay in a great neighborhood of London! Since I’ve launched this giveaway over a holiday weekend there should be fewer entries than usual, and a better chance of winning!
- American’s updated mobile app will guide you through the airport with GPS. Maybe you’ll spend more at their hubs, and generate a greater revenue-share for the airline. I wish the mobile app let you change flights and confirm upgrades, though.
- Delta promises to respond to all tweets within an hour. I’ve always thought ‘time to response’ was the wrong metric for either social engagement or customer service.
- Special offer for joining BP Driver Rewards for gas discounts. (HT: S.)
- Up to 50% off Australia redemptions with Malaysia Airlines Enrich miles. Not useful for most in the US, but Malaysia is a Citi transfer partner. (HT: Loyalty Lobby)
- Who was the worst air rage passenger ever? (HT: Paul H.)
Always appreciate the information you share. Thank you.
Fingers crossed to win
Hi Gary – are the BP bonuses (Hertz/Visa) stackable?
“I’ve always thought ‘time to response’ was the wrong metric for either social engagement or customer service.”
Having worked in a technical call center as a warm bum answering that phone, I can tell you with confidence: you are correct.
Managers haven’t yet figured out how to incentivize good behavior (or maybe they haven’t figured out how to measure customer satisfaction), and so they instead try to justify their value by measuring and then keeping down costs. The most obvious cost in a call center is time, so it’s the obvious target and it’s exceptionally easy to capture information on that metric (assuming you’ve got a decent phone system).
I don’t have the answer to how a customer service center should be run, but I know it’s not the common methodology.
Forgot to mention, outsourcing to contractors often leads to this as well. The contract will generally be written with a strong emphasis on time centered metrics (99.7% of calls answered within 2 seconds, for example) rather than on customer satisfaction, or the customer satisfaction will be poorly measured from some unrelated metric (e.g. whether the customer calls back within 2 minutes). The contractor is incentivized to just get someone off the phone for 2 minutes and to pick up the next call without having actually resolved anything.
It’s truly a horrible system that only exists because we put up with it and/or don’t have any choice.
Old BP offer?
‘Limited-time offer: Earn a 75¢ off per gallon reward**, for every $100 spent on BP fuel at participating locations from now until March 31, 2015
Or it could be that the BP text is a misprint. Later on it says talk about:
“fuel purchases made between 12:00:00 am ET November 1, 2015, and 11:59:59 pm ET March 31, 2015 (“Bonus Reward”).”