I watched ‘Undercover Boss’ last night as someone who was a customer of npower for eleven years. I became their customer because a very pretty and persuasive young lady knocked on my door in 2000 and sold me the deal. Would I have gone with npower if the salesperson had not been a) pretty and b) persuasive, and I had not just got home from work and wanted to chill out? I don’t know, but what I do know is that I didn’t hear another peep out of them until this year when I decided to buy my gas and electricity through a utilities broker. Why did I stay with npower for so long?
Well, it might have been because they sponsor Test cricket, which is far and away my favourite sport. It’s more likely to be because I couldn’t be bothered to change. When npower found out that I was changing to another supplier, they called me and offered me £200 to stay with them. I thought it would be unethical to accept that, so I turned them down. I explained to the young lady who called me, who sounded very embarrassed on the phone, that if someone had called me once or twice during my eleven years as a loyal customer and asked me how I was finding being an npower customer, I might have been happier. I had no particular gripe with them, but I was angry that they only bothered to ask me what I thought when I was leaving them. That is cynical and completely poor customer service, in my view. It is the action of a company that is purely finance driven and has lost contact with its customers and front line people.
I ended up feeling quite sorry for the COO of npower on last night’s ‘Undercover Boss’. He had started off in the front line himself, albeit in a power station, but had obviously found himself seduced by the trappings of power and had lost sight of reality. Just as importantly, the whole top team had no idea of what was going on at the front line of the business. I always find it interesting when contact centre walls are plastered with posters about ‘Making a Difference’ and exhortations to smile, when most of the contact centre workers feel unappreciated and un-supported. Much more effective, in my view, to have managers and supervisors who go around catching people doing something right instead of driving them to achieve figures or targeted numbers of calls taken or made. The most effective and innovative call centre in the U.K. does not have a time limit on customer interactions.
I have long been of the opinion that the most effective senior people in organisations are those who are constantly and totally in touch with what is going on at the most important part of that business; where it interacts with its customers. Those businesses which refuse to acknowledge that truth are, in my view, putting unnecessary limits on their levels of success.