Send the Jerk the Bedbug Letter

There is a wonderful book on the subject of consumer management — especially managing complaints — called “Send the Jerk the Bedbug Letter”. (Complaints department receives a letter from consumer unhappy about cockroach in bed. Manager scrawls “send the jerk the bedbug letter” letter and returns it to complaints department to handle. Complaints department screws up and puts original letter (with manager’s note) in envelope to consumer.) I used to think that South African corporates handle complaints in much the same fashion. I am embarrassed to say that I was wrong.

The results in the story which follows are true. The names are correct. My interpretation of the exact wording, internal scenarios, and discussions is fictional. But your resultant experiences will be similar.

Scene 1 – The SuperCall Sales Manager’s Office – Strategy Meeting.

Sales Manager: Right guys, we’ve been instructed to stop losing consumers. I want suggestions.

Salestron 1: Stop sending contract renewal reminders. That way the consumer automatically defaults to to another 24 month period. We get the renewal, we save postage, and we can even save money on new handsets – it’s a triple benefit.

Sales Manager: I like your thinking. You’re going to go far in this organisation.

Salestron 2: Why don’t we reduce the number of incoming lines to the office? That way we can save on technical and administrative staff. And if the consumer cannot contact us to cancel in the required period – then how can they?

Sales Manager: Hmmm. I’m not sure we can get away with that. Is it legal?

Salestron 2: It probably is. The Road Accident Fund has a rule that claims must be received within 14 days of the accident, and they’re so gung ho about it that some poor sod who was hospitalized for 12 months after an accident cannot claim because he wasn’t able to make his claim in the two weeks. Actually, he couldn’t walk for about 6 months. The case has been going on for years, and is in front of the Constitutional Court. In the meantime we can follow their lead.

Sales manager: Yep, solid argument. I like it.

Salestron 3: Tanya in Sales has a neat trick. When a consumer wants to downgrade an account she delays the process until it is too late, and this forces the consumer to stay on the current contract. Of course she apologises, but by then it is too late, and our Terms and Conditions mean the consumer is stuck for another 24 months.

Salestron 4: Why don’t get a few more Naveshes?

Sales manager: What’s a Navesh?

Salestron 4: He’s that admin assistant in our Johannesburg team with the nerves of ice. It doesn’t matter how much we screw up, or the consumer complains, Navesh simply points to our Terms and Conditions and tells the consumer that it is not permitted, or he tells them he has to refer to his boss.

So if we like totally screw up, and a consumer who has been with us for like 7 years and paid us like R3000/month for 3 phones even though he usually makes like R100 of calls each month, and has automatically renewed because we’ve never told him when the renewals are due, and when he did ask us Tanya delayed the process until it was too late, and when the consumer really blew up we promised a refund which we never did, so Navesh gently slows the game down and keeps pointing to our Terms and Conditions which confirm that the consumer has no rights.

This works wonders. And by the time the consumer has to renew in two years time, he’s forgotten. Or he’s dead. Who cares.

Sales manager: Is this Navesh expensive?

Salestron 4: I don’t think he has to be. A few years ago a university in the United States did some psychological like experiments on some of their students. They wanted to see how far an individual would suspend his morals and like beliefs when under the authority of someone else. They recruited regular students and put them in a position where they were able to inflict pain on others.

In this case, the others were psychology students acting. The pain was an electrical jolt, inflicted by the regular student, which ranged from a mild tickle to a life threatening, lethal amount. About like half of the students were quite happy inflicting lethal doses of electricity on their fellow students — simply because they were told to – even though the ‘victims’ were writhing and screaming in pain and pleading for mercy – much like our consumers do.

I think we can build an administrative team to operate in exactly the same way. In fact, the less we train them, the more likely they are to be completely like ineffective — and have no feelings for the consumer. That means they are also like much cheaper to hire.

Sales manager: I’m not sure about this. Is it legal?

Salestron 4: Is there like a law which says we must be like competent? Even if there is, all of our major competitors are like doing this stuff already. In fact, now that I think about it, almost everything we discussed in this meeting is being done by most of our competitors. Look at Telkom, for example. Is there anything we discussed that they aren’t doing? Or Vodacom? So why shouldn’t we?

It’s like any court case. Make it too expensive for someone to fight with you, and they won’t. It’s like brilliant.

Salestron 5: Why not reduce our admin staffing so that every incoming caller has to hang on for 30 minutes before getting through to someone they think can help? I know its an oldie, and I am almost too embarrassed to mention it, but I have noticed that our consumers only have to hold on for 10 minutes right now and the industry average is 25.

Sales manager: I can see that you guys are after my job! OK team, lets wrap this up so we can get some serious golf in today.

We will immediately institute a strategic communications rationalisation process to eliminate excess line costs and improve consumer efficiency.

We will draft a new policy on contract renewals that tightens the renewal period to the 8 business hours of the last Thursday of the renewal month.

To improve internal administrative efficiencies we will use the last Thursday of each month for training in our ongoing pursuit of commercial excellence.

(To be continued…)

One of the many reasons I prefer doing business with small-business owners rather than corporates is that small-business owners are human. They are usually easy to find on the phone. They are usually approachable. It seems to me that most corporates are like the South African government, hiding their senior people behind layers of Naveshes. Here are a few rules that I now apply before I get into bed with any of these firms.

Use Google to search for the company name, and then look at the first 20 pages that are displayed. The complaints will appear somewhere in those pages. Check with HelloPeter to see whether they respond to complaints at all, how well they respond, and whether they have any complaints listed. (SuperCall features prominently, and it would seem that purchasing a Renault is not quite as wise as you might think.)

Use Google to search for competitors that might be better. If you am forced to do business with this particular company, choose the lowest cost option because it’s easy to upgrade later. They like upgrades. They will not do downgrades, as per the meetings above. Choose the shortest possible contract time. Corporates are hot on promises, but their Terms and Conditions mean that they don’t have to deliver.

And finally, this article was inspired by my own personal experiences with SuperCall over the past four months, my clients’ recent experiences with Telkom and a few banks, and my clients’ recent experiences with photocopier rental companies (about five of them).

Ian Fleming, in one of the James Bond books, quotes something along the following lines: “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, but three times is a conspiracy.”

I think there is a corporate conspiracy of mediocrity and total incompetence, as well a more sinister and fundamental dislike of their consumers that we should be aware of. I think it’s time to take our heads out off our backsides and share our unhappiness with the senior management’s of the firms of which we are consumers. I could be wrong, but I believe we do have some rights. It is our task, nay — our duty, to demand those rights, or go somewhere else.

Google them, and if they’re bad, use someone else.