You’re reading CX Stories, a newsletter about customer experience innovation. If you want to join the 6000+ lovely people who receive it every month, just click the button below.
I’m a bit nervous about sharing this story. Mainly, because I keep receiving emails from people saying things like John, are you ok? and How does this stuff keep happening to you?
This article is not going to help with those concerns.
What follows is a genuine but avoidable mistake, descends into a month of calls, emails, and broken promises, and ends up with me writing a letter to a now-sacked MP. But as well as a villain, it has a truly remarkable hero, and shows the difference between taking ownership of your customers problems, and not. It also shows that bad customer experience really is expensive to provide.
Let’s start at the start.
A few months ago, my Remarkable tablet – like a digital paper notebook – started charging really slowly.
I’d had it for quite a while, so didn’t expect much joy from the company. But to my (pleasant) surprise, Remarkable were, true to their name, great.
As you were one of our early customers, send it back, and if we can’t fix it, we’ll give you another.
A day later, my Remarkable (worth about £350) was packaged up, DHL label on the front, waiting to be collected from the office.
It turned out, my colleague also had a parcel being collected on the same day by Royal Mail.
You can probably guess what happened next.
As I was sat in a meeting I saw the Royal Mail ‘Delivery Officer’ walk out with my parcel. That’s odd, I thought. Maybe they have a deal with DHL?
They do not have a deal with DHL.
That’s ok, I thought. Mistakes happen. And with so many parcels being collected by so many companies in so many offices, surely this will be easy to resolve…
Within ten minutes of my parcel disappearing into the wrong hands, I phoned the Royal Mail Collections team, and waited 30 minutes to get through. I was told that number was for tech queries only, and I’d have to ring customer service. 30 minutes later again, I was told
It will either come back to your office today or will be delivered anyway.
The next day, with nothing having appeared, I popped into the local depot. The guy was brilliantly friendly, and perhaps too honest.
This happens all the time
We took a bloke’s suitcase by mistake once
It’s probably just lying around the office somewhere
He gives me a direct number for the depot to call, but they didn’t pick up. So, I went into the half-hour wait for Customer Services again. This time I was told ‘It’ll take 72 hours for the depot to investigate’ and that once they’ve done that ‘they’ll tell us at Customer Services; they won’t contact you’. So, perhaps understandably, I ask how I, the customer, find out what’s happened to it.
If you’d like feedback, you have to request it – that’ll be another ten days
I’m not sure I’d describe what I was after as ‘feedback’, more ‘an answer’. He also says I can track the parcel using the Royal Mail tracker number, to which I explain – again – that it’s a DHL parcel.
In that case, we’ll give it to DHL to deliver, that’s our process
I try the direct depot number again, and this time get through. Another very lovely, albeit slightly bemused guy answers.
I don’t know why they’ve given you my number, I look after the lorries.
But nonetheless, he says he’ll go and have a look for it, and call me back, which he duly does.
I’ve spoken to the Foreign desk, and they say we’ll deliver it anyway, and just charge them when it arrives.
If you’re keeping count, this means that within the first 24 hours, I was told
- It’s coming back to the office
- It’s going to Hong Kong
- It’s going to DHL
- It’s coming to my home
- It’s lost forever
Variety is the spice of life, eh?
I’m going to fast forward a bit here, for risk of this email being caught in your spam filters due to excessive obscene language. Over the next week, I called several times, and even joined a forum called ‘Royal Mail Chat’ of Royal Mail employees to try and get some insider information.
After some days, the case was escalated to the correctly-names Escalation Team, who promised me a call back within 24 hours.
Four days later, after a few more requests, they phoned me.
It will be fully investigated fully and if we can’t find it, you can apply for compensation from us. You’ll hear back in ten days.
Remember that.
Now, whilst this ludicrous event is playing out, Remarkable are living up to their name. I told them what was happening via webchat – answered immediately by a human – and whilst this is all going on, they emailed every couple of days to see if I had any news, if there was anything they could do to help, and said they’d keep an eye on the serial number of the tablet to make sure it wasn’t being used anywhere else.
Eventually, the promised Royal Mail investigation reply appeared in my inbox…
So, the tablet has disappeared into the ether, and I can claim compensation from them – but have to do it via DHL. Now, maybe I’m just becoming cynical, but my gut feel was that given DHL hadn’t touched the parcel, they’d be pretty unlikely to pay me £350 of compensation.
I contact DHL, who gave an enjoyably specific wait time, which ironically was wrong, as they put me through almost immediately.
Almost as quickly as they answered, they confirmed what we were all thinking: obviously they’re not going to pay compensation for an item they haven’t touched. They show me the terms and conditions, and within minutes emailed me a full copy to share back with Royal Mail. Really impressive.
So back I go to Royal Mail, like a lemming about to jump off the same cliff for the fifteenth time. I share the DHL policy, and that I’ll need the compensation directly from them. Luckily, I was sat down and alone when the email came through, with nothing valuable or breakable within reach.
(Pay special attention to the line ‘committed to providing a consistent level of customer service’. I’d certainly agree it had been consistently something…)
I updated Remarkable on what had been going on. They continued to be brilliant. Once I told them I wasn’t going to get the item or the money back, they offered to give me a new one but at a heavily discounted price, a fraction of the usual cost. Within two days that had been packaged up, posted from abroad, and arrived at my home.
As for the Royal Mail, I sent a few more emails back and forth over the next few days, asking if someone could call me to talk about it, and asking where I was supposed to get compensation from. Neither question was answered, and no-one would speak to me.
In the end, they just stopped replying, with their final email confirming that, with regret, the item cannot be located, and they would no longer contact me.
Two days later, my original Remarkable arrived back at my house (with a surcharge of £7 to pay)
And when I told Remarkable? They said I could keep both.
When I wrote The Human Experience (have I mentioned I wrote a book?), I suggested seven human ‘behaviours’ that the best customer experiences organisations exhibit. For me, this is one of the first experiences I’ve had that failed on every front:
- Accessible – long wait times, confusing emails, no conversation with the escalation team
- Consistent – told six possible different answers, every channel giving a different view
- Flexible – Rigidly sticking to a process with no adjustment for context or circumstance
- Proactive – Failed to call back multiple times. All the effort on me.
- Respectful – No respect for my time, the effort put in, or the potential impact of the loss
- Responsible – No obvious intention to help me solve the issue, or take ownership
- Straightforward – Complex procedures, unclear timelines, confusing conversations
And so, I did what I do best, and wrote a 2,500 word, ten-page letter to the Review Service, the CEO and, just for good measure, the MP who oversees the service (albeit, it’s now a private company). Not to get more money, but to let them know about their highly costly ways of working.
By the time I’d finished writing this, I’d received my reply from the review panel.
‘I acknowledge your dissatisfaction with how your complaint was handled therefore, I have arranged for a cheque to the value of £25.00 to be sent to you’
When I replied and asked whether the information would be used to improve the service, I was told that
‘Your particular experience is a rare occurrence. Please be assured that your concerns have been recorded and will be kept on file. ‘
So that’s a no, then.
This experience, whilst extreme, is symptomatic of an understaffed organisation with the barricades up, unable and unwilling to help customers for fear of extra work or compensation cost, and uninterested in learning to improve.
The result is an experience which is highly stressful for me, and highly costly for the Royal Mail. All those calls, emails, letters; all the time spent by me and them, nearly all of it totally avoidable. And in the end, totally pointless.
Of course, the irony is that their process did actually work. It’s just that no-one knew it, and no-one had faith in it. But, as I always say, bad customer experience is expensive to provide. They really should aim to deliver better.
Thanks for reading this article, I really hope you enjoyed it. You can subscribe to my monthly newsletter below, find me in picture form on Instagram @johnjsills, or in work mode at The Foundation and LinkedIn.
johnJsills 