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Over the past few weeks, and especially within the last 7-10 days, many must have noticed I’ve been having a torrid time with Lenovo/IBM, and there have been quite a few exchanges between me, David Churbuck, Mark Hopkins and others at the Lenovo customer center. I admit there has been much going on, mostly from my side, I would like to apologize to both David Churbuck and Mark Hopkins who have bore the brunt of my anger. Mark especially as he was my primary point of contact. This post is partly in response to David’s excellent post on losing out on a customer (Stop dear reader, click the link, read it and come back :D), and partly my viewpoint on customer relationship management in general in today’s tech-savvy world.

We live in a tech-savvy world, where information is on our fingertips. We are spoilt; everything that we ever needed to know is now a mouse click ever away. Everything I want can be ordered online. Heck, I can as well lead my life without setting a step outside my apartment if we wanted to. This has led us, the consumers, to expect perhaps a level of service that most companies are trying hard to catch up. We no longer cant wait for an invoice that will take 6 days to arrive – a email invoice will do. I want quick resolutions if somethings go wrong as I now have other options to consider – there are other brands and names that will equally satisfy my hunger if my present ones don’t. I as a consumer want instant gratification. If I have a problem, I want them to be resolved quick, else the company loses my business. This is where the world is leading to. And this is where most companies are leading to as well. Companies have discovered that the traditional by-the-phone support may not be just good enough; hence now you have online chatting for support, or email, or the latest fad around the world: blogging.

I have never taken blogging seriously, and I think its nothing but a highly egoistic and narcissistic activity. Frankly I blog because I can. But events over the past week may have forced a rethink on my part and may be grasp the power of blogging. I may still not be convinced that blogging is going to replace mainstream media or gather as much respect as mainstream media, but I can see someday where blogging might actually be a tool for companies to evaluate themselves or as David says become a norm in solving customer issues. Or if nothing else, it will help irate customers spread their knowledge! [Like me eh? :D] (Though eventually I expect the internet to have so many irate customers shouting around that it will be almost impossible to judge quality of a certain product or customer service by blogs. It won’t matter then. And then companies will stop reading blogs).

But that is far away. As a consumer, I am very picky. I do not buy something just because a salesman fooled me into it. Every purchase of mine brings with lots of valuable research and time I spend on it. When I buy a product online, my first step on the internet is to see how many irate customers have talked about it in forums / amazon.com / boards. I narrow down my choices carefully eliminating the ones with bad reviews, and then I finally buy the product that doesn’t have too many reviews online or has the least reviews online. I don’t care for the showering reviews on the product.

The reason? I often find that most people who are happy about their product will not really spend time on the internet explaining to others why they found a particular product to be great; they will be busy enjoying their product :D. Heck, if I was satisfied with my Lenovo, except a cursory post about how great their laptop is, I would not have really written a long review on it. If someone were to ask me in real life or online as to what I thought of them, I would of course shower them with good words. But it is not the case when a product screws up. Most people like to tell others if a product does not work. I will be more likely to warn my friends pro-actively if my product doesn’t work so that they may not make a mistake of buying it. The internet is just an extension of relieving the frustration of owning a broken product. This is just human nature. We like to speak out about things that go wrong.

Many companies, including Lenovo, have now discovered that this extension of frustration to internet is a dangerous thing. The internet is one huge community where anyone can talk to anybody. Suddenly that one irate customer who otherwise would have warned 5 friends of his against buying a product, can now warn 5000 people on the internet. Companies now seem to take this as a real threat – and as Lenovo has done introduced online departments to take care of such issues going out of hand. Which is exactly where David Churbuck and his team work @ Lenovo (or as I presume). While it is an admirable move by Lenovo that they have been more pro-active than anyone else I know of in contacting their irate customers (compliments to David here), though there is a difference between thought and action, and why people expressing themselves online need to be taken care off, pronto.

And here’s why:

A blogger or a person reviewing about his broken product is not merely talking bad about it, but is talking about it in frustration. The consumer would not be spending time online explaining his frustrations on his or her blog if they are not frustrated and gone through the support process. Think about it : If something goes wrong with my product, I would rather call up support first and see if there is a solution to my problem. Why? Because I want instant solution to my problem. If my issues are resolved with a call, why should I ever write about it online in the first place? It is only when I as a consumer have no remedy to my problem that I will resort to internet start shouting my views out warning people.

Hence when David mentions:

“I am concerned that our efforts to improve the customer experience for bloggers will create the perception that by blogging a complaint, a person will be rewarded and given priority over a customer who may not have a blog. The downside of listening and responding is that it could, in theory, reward the practice of a perturbed customer opening a blog simply to vent their dissatisfaction and break the service policies put in place to treat all customers equally.”

I cannot agree with it. It is simply because a blogger who is blogging about it (a) is more likely to have gone through support process. (b) and once resigned that his problem is not taken care of, is voicing his opinion online. By virtue of having gone through the trouble before hand, does in fact make him a higher priority, and does need to be taken care off. Secondly companies do not go hunting for people with problems. People with problems come hunting for companies. In near future where blogging is an everyday affair, Lenovo or any other company will not make the same effort to catch customer with support problems online proactively, because everyone else is already doing it and they did go crazy with the logistics of it all.

Take for example my own case: By the time I had blogged in detail about the laptop, I had gone through this –

1 – Lenovo having no clue about my warranty status. Hence explaining to them about my purchase.
2 – Going through the customer support drill that did not solve the problem at hand.
3 – Sending the laptop back to the depot and waiting 3 days.
4 – Getting the serviced laptop back to discover the same problem exists again.
5 – Talking back to customer support who still did not have a clue of my warrant status, and then asked to get my laptop replaced.
6 – Waiting for the replacement laptop to arrive.
7 – Talking to Lenovo (through David and Mark) to get issue resolved.
8 – Getting the new replacement laptop to discover that the problem still persisted.
9 – Listening to false expectations of someone contacting me to resolve my issue ASAP.
10 – Eventually getting a replacement part because Lenovo did or did not believe was an issue.

And then after the part was replaced

11 – Discovering another issue with the laptop.

Will it surprise anyone that Lenovo lost me as a customer? Will it surprise anyone that I want to cry out loud and tell others not to buy this Laptop? Is my action unjustified because Lenovo tried hard to solve the issue and they could not? Because I was contacted by important people in the company, and was prioritized, does it mean I should expect and live with a inferior product? Lenovo must have done the best they could, but was their best enough in my case? No.

Lenovo lost me as a customer but for the plain simple fact that the product simply failed to function as promised. Period.

Could Lenovo have done something about it though to resolve the issue before it went this way? Yes there were many thing they could have done from the begining.

I will use Lenovo as an example to talk about pro-active customer relationship a bit, and what Lenovo could have done, or could do in future. This applies to how I see pro-active customer satisfaction in general too.

Set Expectations. Then follow on it

A colleague of mine remarked yesterday that he had gotten tired of waiting for his repairmen to arrive and repair his deck and was changing his contractors. His complaint? They contractors kept telling him they would arrive a certain day but never did. This went on for a couple of days after which he lost his patience. Companies often make this mistake of over-setting customer’s expectations. If you set an expectation that someone will call me ASAP, then someone should. Whether or not that call help resolves the issue is another matter, but the fact that the company responded as promised builds confidence that the company cares about me. Merely setting an expectation that I should be expecting something, but not getting it is simply going to frustrate me. Not just me, but any consumer. If you factor in the already built up frustration of gone through 1 through 8 above, it is quite natural for any consumer like me begins to feel that companies are fooling them. It is better to set lower expectations and over matching it, then setting higher expectations and not matching it.

Do your research before you talk to the customer

Find out as much as possible about the customer’s problem. What is he facing? What is case number? What product of the company is he using? Does the company have those resources to test out the problem. If yes, reaffirm it with customer again. Set a time. Give a courtesy call, and get as much details as possible to diagnose the problem. Unless hopelessly irate, most customers will give you the information, because they’ve paid for the product and they want it to work. And don’t ever tell your customer that you don’t have the resources or a similar product with you to reproduce the problem. That is just a bad idea.

Retain the customer, not his money. Think outside the box.

David makes a point here which I will use as an example to illustrate my point:

“For the business, we lost money on the machine almost from the moment we started engaging with the customer. “

One of the things Lenovo could have done pro-actively was to send an engineer to my place immediately after I complained that their second laptop had the same problem. The service engineer who eventually got to me admitted first hand that there was a problem. Lenovo could have saved not only their own resources and time testing their product in house, but would have gone out of their way to get me into confidence again.

In my experience however hard I test my product, I will get a customer with a problem that I can never duplicate. There is no way around it. In such a situation, it is in companies benefit to solve problems quickly and efficiently. This has happened before and happens to me all the time. As an example to David’s point above, we had a customer who was well out of warranty, and was using a product that my company no longer manufactures. Yet, when he called us with a problem, we tried to assist him for a day to figure out what was wrong. We could’ve technically asked the customer to go through the whole support registration process again, and then make him send us the defective parts, and then yet again send him corrected parts.

Instead, I was asked to visit him. I drove down 350 miles. 10 minutes on the system, I knew what the problem was. 20 minutes later I was back on way.

Technically everyone lost time and money behind this exercise. Yet, we were left with a happy customer who swears by our product. I think I have made my point.

Don’t keep fixing the same thing again and again

I lost my patience with Lenovo eventually at the last hurdle when I was informed that I was being sent yet another wireless card to resolve my secondary issue. It was simply not worth the time and effort anymore.

Why? Because by this time I as a consumer had lost my confidence with the product at hand. My first feeling was – “Ok this is fixed, but this is now not working right, what next?“. How should I as a consumer trust a product that is not working as promised? Is it worth my time and energy, and more importantly is it worth the money I put into it to keep a defective product? Even if the replacement card was changed, would I be able to trust this product to work efficiently? Even if it did work, would I trust it anymore?

No. Once a customer loses faith in a product, it is quite difficult to replace it back. That is true for all products, all companies. Lenovo could have simply sent me another machine with a better wireless card which worked, but they didn’t. Instead they chose to go down the same path again, aware that by this time the customer had all lost all faith in the product itself. Customer confidence is important. Companies who want to retain their image as a good company that cares should care about their customers who have clearly undergone a lot of trouble.

What happened when Lenovo tried to fix the same thing again and again? The consumer simply lost his trust in the brand all-together.

Take for example: When my dad called up last night about which brand of Laptop he should suggest his IT administrator get for his whole team, my response was “Anything but Lenovo“. His comment was “But we were thinking Thinkpads! Aren’t they the best?“. I replied – “They were probably. I have one of the same company, and its been terrible“. The consumer (me), not only lost his trust in this specific line of laptop, but the brand itself. Now if Lenovo had been more pro-active, my response could have been – “Yeah, I’ve heard Thinkpads are good. Avoid the 3000 N100 series though – I had one, but they fixed it. Still, I think Thinkpads should be good“.

Truth to be told, it was only the brand name IBM which prompted me to stick around with Lenovo for this long. Any other brand, I would have probably just dumped and picked up a different one.

And lastly but not the least:

Customer is the king

This is a paradigm which I have come to believe should be true for every single company out there. You do not alienate your customer by sending them signals that you do not trust them. Though I notice this is an increasingly dangerous trend that most PC manufacturers seem to have taken, Lenovo is no exception. I once had to explain a 70 year old woman at 2 A.M in the morning how to connect wireless internet. She was my customer and knew my cell phone number, and though technically I had no business in responding to a support call at that hour (I was a network admin in my last job and I did technical support only when I was in office), I decided to take it. I was in half a mind to tell her that it was a nice time to sleep, but I did not. It was increasingly difficult to help her too – clearly she was not computer literate. I had to tell her to look for a “TV symbol” in the bottom right corner of her screen to make her double click on the wireless connectivity icon. After nearly half-hour, she was connected.

A week later I was down in the marina she was living, installing another Access Point in the area when I ran into her almost accidentally. She couldn’t stop thanking me for the help, and told me how she had taught her husband to use internet as well. That experience thought me something: That the customer is ultimately the king. A happy customer is a good customer. She remained our customer until I left (and I am willing to bet she still is).

Customers build brand. And not otherwise. Companies must try to do everything possible to make sure they have a happy customer. No two customers are alike, no two customers have the same personality. It is for the company to know how to work with them. You work with them, not against them.

Coming to Lenovo itself, it has a huge ladder to climb. IBM has left such a legacy behind that Lenovo will have to go out of its way to tell people that they are as good as if not better than the legacy the brand IBM left behind.

Phew, this was long! Thankews for reading. And I promise this is the last time I will talk about anything related to Lenovo. I am bored already. Arent you 😀