
Reducing customer service call volume at Expedia - jatsign
https://marker.medium.com/how-expedia-solved-a-100-million-customer-service-nightmare-d7aabc8d4025
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Twirrim
Anecdotally, NTL (cable company) in the UK faced a similar issue, and took the
worst way to resolve it.

Instead of looking at and understanding why customers were calling in, they
decided to outsource management of support to a company that specialised in
cutting down the costs.

The methods they employed had employees required to reduce the average support
call duration, much like it suggests Expedia started out doing. Employees that
didn't hit or beat their average call duration targets got put on a
performance improvement plan, and then ultimately laid off.

That average call time was then steadily reduced in stages. It was a great
success, the average call duration dropped rapidly. What was happening was
employees would "accidentally" disconnect customers if they came close to the
target call time. Or just randomly drop calls early on if they were worried
their average was too high. Customer dissatisfaction was significantly higher.
Call volume was higher (but not everyone bothered to call back). Average call
duration was down though, so big success! Customer retention was getting
worse, but that, of course, was tracked under a different silo by a different
team who had nothing to do with the support org.

At one stage, they actually dropped the target average call duration to less
time than it took to reboot a NTL router / set top box, which was the very
first thing customers were advised to do by support agents. They did finally
notice, then, but their only solution was to increase the time by 30 seconds
or so.

Give the wrong people at the wrong level the goals, and you're going to get
poor results.

~~~
NicoJuicy
One big issue is that only easier things get handled.

Some metrics are plain wrong.

~~~
Twirrim
Speaking of wrong metrics, another anecdote:

I used to work for an ISP. Some genius high up in the support management chain
decided that tickets were taking too long to resolve, and the touch rate was
too high. So they implemented a way to measure how many times a ticket
communicated on before it was resolved, and somehow turned that in to what
they called a "conversion percentage". Percentage of what was never expressed.

The result, naturally, is that customers started talking to a void. Tickets
took longer to resolve because the support engineers would waste time not
asking clarifying questions because that would hurt their conversion
percentage. Customer dissatisfaction soared.

A week or two after it went live, some engineers in the NOC team figured out
that if you took a ticket, resolved it, and then re-opened it, you'd hit a
100% conversion rate, regardless of how you then communicated on it. Slowly
but surely that started spreading through the company and things pretty much
got back on track and customer satisfaction returned.

When I left, they were still tracking that conversion percentage, even though
every support engineer was now taught during on-boarding that the way to
handle a ticket was to resolve it and re-open it. Firmly on its way to
becoming "it's just the way things are done"

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9nGQluzmnq3M
One big reason why outsourcing support is such a bad idea is that the
incentives of the outsourcing company are diametrically opposite from yours.
They want billable hours, and will do the least work possible to hit your KPIs
so they can keep the contract.

For example, if 58% of your customers are calling in to have their itineraries
resent, that's _awesome_ for the company because that's a lotta volume (and
volume is money!) _and_ it's really easy to hit KPIs for call length,
satisfaction etc. They are thus doubly _negatively_ incentivized not to do any
upstream resolution: not only would they get paid less, but all their KPIs
would plummet, because the remaining calls are now on average harder to
resolve, take longer, and have more grumpy customers leaving bad CSAT scores!

~~~
DrScump
T-Mobile customers can see a real live A/B test contrasting well-trained,
thorough domestic support personnel versus an offshored organization that
seems incented to simply dispose of calls as quickly as possible.

I have a particularly complex set of service combinations with T-Mobile. Any
changes to my account configuration or devices can result in downstream
breakages, especially when one promo crowds out another.

I used towork in support, and I was the first person in the company to carry
the title Advanced Support Engineer. I know the initiative and the depth of
knowledge it takes to be a truly effective support engineer. I have been
consistently impressed by the personnel in T-Mobile's Eugene, Oregon support
operation, which I tend to encounter when calling during conventional business
hours in my time zone.

in contrast, the overseas support operation that I land on if calling off
hours has been worse than useless, so much so that I generally give up and
live with whatever breakage has occurred until business hours if it all
possible. They are just that bad. They may execute the most basic, redundant,
rote solutions, generally, but they demonstrate no discomfort in flat lying
about both solutions and what steps they've taken... especially account
credits. One of these screwups was so severe that it took a dedicated rep in
Oregon hours of research and numerous tasks spanning a week to repair (plus
follow-up three weeks later to make sure the fixes "took").

It's absolutely night and day -- awesome or excruciating.

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taurath
I had a terrible experience renting in a foreign country thru Expedia. The
rental was a condo, and the person never showed up. I’m standing in front of
the condo for 5 hours, they wouldn’t do anything to help me. They even claimed
to have called the property owner, who said I wasn’t there, whilst I was
standing right outside the building!

If there’s ever a problem, Expedia will claim time be “just a middleman” and
you are screwed. I never got my money back and had to find another hotel at
11pm.

~~~
lotsofpulp
They actually are a middleman (travel agent). I stick to dealing directly with
the big hotel brands, as their policies dictate that if you aren’t able to be
accommodated, then they will find you an equivalent room and pay for at least
the first night. And if they can’t do that, I would trust them to compensate
some other way.

Otherwise you can just do a chargeback and claim services not rendered and you
should get your money back that way.

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techie128
Having booked travel through Expedia several times recently, I can confidently
say that Expedia has not fixed its top issue for calling them - "To get a copy
of their itinerary." Their system is buggy at best. The funny thing was the
customer service reps couldn't send me a copy of the itinerary either. Nothing
came off of Twitter too. Finally, one heroic chat rep was able to copy-paste
the itinerary and email it via some random customer service email address.
Loved him but never going to use Expedia ever again. EVER.

P.S.: If you check their twitter feed, you'll know what I am talking about. It
is also an engineering failure from the get-go. Not being able to retrieve
your itinerary online is an engineering failure on so many levels.

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extragood
This is a subject that's very near and dear to my heart.

At its core, it's the alignment between customer experience and product.
Support as the customer facing representatives need to be empowered to convey
the shortcomings of the product as it impacts customer experience. The product
team in turn should then digest that information and relay it to the people
building the product, the engineers in this case.

Good alignment/synergy etc. between those teams leads to good customer
experience.

My support team calls it "support deflection" (in terms of how it impacts
support). "Upstream solution" (from the article) is roughly equivalent, from a
different perspective.

The challenge that we face as support professionals becomes existential, once
we've mastered deflection. As the article points out, it is very hard to
measure that type of success.

The less reliance customers have on support, the less important support is to
the company's success. The less important support is to the company's success,
the less support is valued.

If fewer support requests come in for an extended period, then the support
team will be downsized.

If a company is around long enough, surely undervaluing support services will
likely catch up with them as new features and eventually new products are
rolled out, and support professionals can only hope that executives are far-
sighted enough to recognize that.

The problem that I've been stuck on for a while is how to align company
interests with the support team's best interests, long term. Solving customer
problems "upstream" is essentially fighting against ourselves.

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pingec
My experience with Expedia support is so-so as of this month.

One of my flights was cancelled by Air France and Expedia informed me about it
and offered 2 alternative flights or partial refund. To communicate my choice
I had to call their support in IE or UK. This is not easy when one is in
Indonesia in a remote place. They refused to communicate over email.

So I got a skype subscription and called them. I told them I wished to be
refunded because none of the alternative flights offered were compatible with
my schedule and they were not able to offer any other flights. They said ok
but were unable to tell me how much I would get refunded. They also said I
would be receiving an email confirming the refund in 2 days. I received no
email, I called them back and asked if my refund choice was registered in
their system and if I could get a proof of our agreement for a refund eg. via
email. They assured me an email would be sent shortly. It has now been two
weeks and I have so far received no refund nor any email or other proof that
we have agreed on a refund nor do I know when to expect this refund or the
amount.

~~~
martinko
To be fair their support is probably getting hammered these days because of
the Coronavirus. I was trying to reschedule my trip last week, and I alone
consumed several HOURS of support time (they had to call the airline several
times, where there was a waiting time, and the hotel).

Nevertheless, I was able to reschedule my non-refundable non-rescheduleable
trip, and the support was great.

