If you ask people in general about what companies they see as offering great client service, you will hear an interesting set of responses. Some modern firms get mentioned (like, say, Amazon) where the quality of service is easily measurable (for example, do they deliver when they say they will?) and transparent to the consumer (order tracking and so on). The other category of candidate firms tend to be those that handle problems well. M&S used to feature highly, as did John Lewis – both retailers with a history of straightforward and lenient returns policies.
Ask people about bad client service, and things tend to be much more straightforward. Companies that handle problems badly.
This isn't just conjecture – these were questions that I asked of hundreds of people in my years as a consultant. The upshot of all of this is that if you provide a product or service, you must ensure that you manage the experience around it well, otherwise you'll be dependent on handling mistakes for your clients to find out how good you are. And that might just be too late…
I'll talk a bit about how that client experience might be structured at a later date – I mainly want to get what has been the worst client experience I have had in many, many years off my chest.
Lenovo (and previously IBM) have been our supplier of choice for Windows laptop machines for quite some time. In April we ordered a batch of 25 devices through our reseller. I had been relatively happy with the quality of the devices being supplied until recently, and our Lenovo account manager had been one of the best people we've been dealing with in recent years. Warning signs were there in the Spring, however, when a series of supply issues started to emerge.
The batch of devices we had ordered arrived, and as we asset tagged them, my team noticed that on a number of them (13, to be precise) USB ports were mounted in such a way that inserting a USB plug took quite substantial force. I got in touch with our reseller, and requested to return the faulty devices. Lenovo got back and said we would have to return them for repair.
I don't know about you, but if you've spent £850 on a laptop, sending it for repair before you have even used it seems a bit of a rum deal.A baker's dozen, even more so. I refused, and requested replacements.
Other than reasonably regular emails from my account manager saying “things were being escalated”, nothing happened until last week, seven or so weeks after the initial order was received. The response was a detailed technical description about how, even if it did take some substantial force to insert or remove a device, it was within the specified force (in Newtons) to comply with USB specifications, and therefore there wasn't a problem.
Seven weeks of silence, and then a science lecture. I responded that it seemed Lenovo were leaving me little choice but to find an alternative supplier.
That received no response, and, to make matters worse, it turned out that the manager concerned then went on holiday. Probably he needed a rest after measuring too many Newtons.
Chasing again this week, and it wasn't until yesterday morning that I was called by a colleague of the Newton-measurer, and that call was to tell me that there was nothing that he could do for me. I haven't had many more pointless phone conversations in my life. Later yesterday afternoon I was contacted by the manager's manager. Who also told me that there was nothing that they could do for me with regard to the devices that had a problem (but weren't faulty).
As I have pointed out, at length, we've been paying premium prices for Lenovo equipment over the years on the basis of the promise of quality manufacturing and service associated with a major manufacturer (let's be honest, one called IBM). If all of the units had been identical, then it might have been a reasonable case to suggest that they were built to specification, but there was substantial variation. Holding down a laptop with two hands to plug and unplug devices (which on well-travelled laptops happens frequently) is a broken motherboard waiting to happen.
But even worse than the product quality, has been the way in which they have dealt with it. Seven weeks of complete silence, followed, essentially, by a lecture that I am wrong, and that they are to do nothing to try to resolve the situation other than tell me that I am wrong. One would expect this from Steve Jobs, but I can't buy MacOS devices from anyone else so I have to put up with it. Lenovo are in a very crowded marketplace.
The crowning glory of this whole episode was this morning. After promising that someone would get back to me with a proposal for delivering some sort of client satisfaction, Newton-Monitor-in-Chief left that to the poor (and now with one less client) account manager. And the “satisfaction”? That Lenovo weren't to do anything. At all.
If anyone from Lenovo gets to read this, you are more than welcome to leave comments.
mmitII 