A Customer Service Blog

Anyone who has been reading this blog over the last month or so will be aware of all the problems we have had with our good friends at British Telecom.

Suffice to say that when we recently moved offices BT did absolutely everything in their power to mess up the process and we ended up without any internet for over a week.

Last week I wrote on this blog that there are three key stages to customer service - the before, the during and the after.  BT contrived to mess up all three parts of the process in some way or another.

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There are three major stages to achieving excellence in customer service.  They are quite simply -

1. What happens before someone buys from you?
2. What happens during the transaction?
3. What happens after the transaction has taken place (including what happens when things go wrong)?

Only those organisations who pay equal attention to each of the above three stages will have a hope of achieving excellence in customer service.

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Anyone who has traveled on Eurostar will probably have had a good experience.  There really is nothing like it for convenience and ease of travel, it is so much more pleasant than the plane in every way.  Overall Eurostar does well with its customer service or at least it does well when things are going well but what happens when things go wrong like they did just before Christmas?

In case anyone is not familiar with this story allow me to fill in the gaps.  Due to heavy snow the Eurostar network ground to a halt just before Christmas.  Trains were stuck in tunnels, people were stuck on platforms and overall it was a great big mess.

This morning sees the publishing of a report into the matter which as well as being critical of the technology that failed due to the snow the report is expected to be damning about Eurostar’s customer service.

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I was pleased to see BT announcing record profits this morning.  First of all I was pleased because my call which apparently cost them £150 should hopefully be able to be absorbed by the £128m profits made. Secondly I am pleased because hopefully they might reinvest some of this profit into improving their frankly useless cak-handed systems.

When I left you yesterday we had identified 5 or so key customer service failings and we were only 24 hours into the sorry affair.

By the afternoon of Wednesday (two days after my order had been canceled by BT, not me) I had still heard nothing.  I was actually away from the office on other business and didn’t have time to call them until Wednesay afternoon.  I was still totally in the dark over when i would be connected or indeed if my order had even been resubmitted.

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Followers of this blog will have noticed that we have had very few posts over the last week or so.  For this you can blame our good friends at British Telecom.

I have honestly never had such a frankly depressing, awkward and infuriating customer experience.

I am very pleased to announce that GA Training has just moved to a lovely new and modern office and problems with BT aside we are all very happy.

On the day of the move I was told that an engineer would meet our IT engineer and install both the phone line and subsequently broadband at the new office.  We gave our staff a day off and told them to be in bright eyed and bushy tailed first thing the next day to start working.

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