Making Sure the ‘Service’ in Customer Service is Fulfilled

Interactive Intelligence is one of Indiana’s true technology success stories, a leader in internship efforts and, by the way, on the Best Places to Work in Indiana list for the eighth time in the nine-year history of the program.

But this post relates to a very interesting customer service experiment from chief marketing officer Joe Staples. I’ll set up the scenario below (in Joe’s own words from his initial blog post). Then check out the two links at the bottom for the very telling information he learned.

The airline in question here is not the focus; it’s customer service, no matter your organization, and what you can and should be doing whether responding to a good or bad customer experience.

In early January I had one of the most challenging travel weeks that I’ve had in a long time. Snow, ice, cold, all contributed to a series of missed flights, reroutes, and lost luggage. Now mind you, I travel enough each year to go around the world around seven times. I’m a million-miler and proudly carry my Diamond Medallion card like a badge of honor. So, I’m no travel wimp!

During my January travel troubles, I thought overall Delta provided great service. That said, over the space of the week I had good experiences and bad experiences. This got me to thinking …

Here’s the two-part experiment I’m going to conduct. Next week, as close together as I can, I’m going to send an email, launch a tweet, initiate a chat, and place a call into the service desk, all as part of my “desire to share my compliments for the great job Delta did” (I’ll cite specific examples). I’ll be sure I label my communications as a “service compliment.” Then three days later I’ll do the same thing. Only this time it will be to “voice my complaint” (again citing a specific example). I’ll label this set of communications as a “service complaint.”

My plan is to document everything: who responded; how long did the response take; what was the action taken; etc. My hope is that my experiment will show some distinctions between the various communications channels, as well as to show the difference in response to a compliment vs. a complaint.

Blog 2: Compliment

Blog 3: Complaint