All this PR and they mess up the customer service

The comparison between the investment companies put into advertising and public relations compared to customer services is intriguing. Companies can put a huge amount of effort into creating a favourable brand with potential customers, but then they mess up the service when these people decide to place their business with them. Often the companies in question deliver, or begin to deliver, what they said they were going to do, but when a problem occurs the customer service procedures are just not robust enough to ensure a reliable solution. For example, this week my BT broadband hub broke. Annoying but these things happen. So, I call up BT and speak to a very helpful guy who confirms that the hub is broken. He then orders another one and advises that it’ll be with me in 3 days. Problem was, something went awry and the hub didn’t arrive. So after 3 days I call BT and am told something went wrong with the ordering of the new hub and they are sorry but it’ll be another 3 days. Annoying, no point shouting down the phone at the bloke but annoying all the same. Now, to be fair to BT I’ve had some positive customer experiences with them but this is such a common problem we all have with UK companies. (By the way I’ve recently ordered some kit from Dixons.com and they were excellent.) That said, who can remember NTL? They were brilliantly bad but at least we all knew that if you had an NTL query you had to right off the day and commit yourself to a serious piece of investigation to find the right person to contact, get hold of them and commit them to action. The whole process was so extraordinary, you could only laugh. So, my point is, bearing in mind that this is, in essence, a communications problem and PR agencies have numerous (sometimes pretty niche) service offerings ranging from Youth Marketing , to Product Placement through to Internal Comms (OK, that’s not niche) why doesn’t some bright spark set up a practice called Customer Service Communications? PR agencies could then use their skills to audit the process companies use, train the individuals concerned and then apply relevant technology. There’s got to be some money there for PR consultancies and it would mean companies don’t spend all this money attracting customers only to lose them because someone didn’t press the right button and there was no fail safe loop in the system to check. All I ask is that if it works, you tell people you heard it here first and you buy me a pint!