{"id":1096,"date":"2024-12-04T09:57:04","date_gmt":"2024-12-04T09:57:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/?p=1096"},"modified":"2024-12-05T07:22:11","modified_gmt":"2024-12-05T07:22:11","slug":"hooray-for-humanity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/hooray-for-humanity\/","title":{"rendered":"Hooray for Humanity!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I kicked myself about how I ended my last, more lighthearted, \u201cAngry Lemons<\/a>\u201d blog because I missed a really obvious loop back to why protecting the humanity of our expressions, emotions and our empathy are all so powerful within the world of service.\u00a0 You know, an opportunity to connect my rambles to actual BUSINESS and my key area of expertise?! (doh!)\u00a0 So let me right this wrong in my efforts this month and pick up from last month\u2019s missive, illustrating my point with an example from a recent service experience, yes, it\u2019s another story about ticket purchasing<\/a>. Hooray!<\/p>\n

I am partial to events.\u00a0 Both in work as a connector of people and enabler of impact, and in my personal life (The memories! The Instagram opportunities!)\u00a0 Halloween extravaganzas<\/a>, Santa experiences<\/a>, the list of planned fun activities is endless, so it will come as no surprise to you that we had booked to visit the Christmas light trail in Cardiff. I fully appreciate how lucky we are that I’m able to do these things. I know that not everyone is able to.<\/p>\n

The devastating flooding that South Wales has recently experienced had also affected this event unfortunately, so we received an email from the ticket provider explaining that our forthcoming visit could not proceed as they needed to clean up the site, but by clicking the link provided you could rebook.<\/p>\n

My husband clicked the link and then tried to rebook for the next weekend that my stepdaughter was coming to stay (two weeks later) on the same day of the week, same time, but now, it was going to cost us \u00a37 extra (this included ANOTHER transaction fee by the way \u2026 grrr).<\/p>\n

Sarah \u201cI know my rights\u201d Lethbridge began to stir from the sofa.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat can\u2019t be right? Let me have a look\u201d. Snatches phone from husband to start investigating.\u00a0 After some extensive clicking and exploratory navigation, I concluded that there was no way that we could rebook without paying the \u00a37.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust pay it and I\u2019ll complain and ask for a refund for the difference\u201d.<\/p>\n

With the incessant pulse of consumer injustice coursing through my veins, I picked up my laptop and then began to attempt to find an email address for the ticket provider to request the return of our \u00a37.<\/p>\n

Reader, I COULD NOT FIND ONE. My \u201cbeautiful service experience\u201d spidey senses started twitching in the knowledge that the last of Lou Downe\u2019s \u201cGood Services\u201d<\/a> manifesto, point 15, is \u201cmake it easy to get human assistance\u201d.<\/p>\n

They had obviously not read the book.<\/p>\n

There then followed complex navigation through their portal which required \u201crequests to access your order\u201d to be able to ask them any questions about your purchase. I click and click and clicked and finally got to a point where I could send a message.<\/p>\n

I would share what I wrote with you but I can\u2019t because I have no ability to see what I wrote anywhere. It has disappeared into a customer care phantom zone. It was basically \u2018CAN WE HAVE OUR \u00a37 BACK PLEASE?\u2019, put better.<\/p>\n

To which we received this reply the next day, from a \u2018no reply\u2019 email.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

Err, pardon? Did you read what I wrote? Your reply has no seeming connection to the message I sent you which clearly articulated our issue and simply asked for the difference between the two costs?<\/p>\n

I SMELL BOT.<\/p>\n

Furious, I click, click, clicked, \u201crequested to access my order\u201d, click, click, clicked, before I composed, in a tone that can only be described as \u2018terse\u2019, another request for the refund of the \u00a37, which, a day later, triggered this message.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

WHAT!? I JUST WANT THE DIFFERENCE IN PRICE BACK! Interestingly, this reply appeared to be from \u2018Customer Services\u2019 as opposed to the previous \u2018Customer Support\u2019 team (both teams partial to the most irritating email close of all time \u201cKind Regards\u201d as well as both using a \u2018no reply\u2019 email address – the sure sign of a service that doesn\u2019t really care).<\/p>\n

But wasn\u2019t this reply just automated too as it seemingly paid no attention to anything that I said? Were there really two teams or is this just how the algorithm responds when the system knows this is my second attempt?<\/p>\n

Urgh. This wasn\u2019t working.\u00a0 I needed a new angle.\u00a0 I turned to Facebook to see if anyone else was having the same difficulties. To my surprise they weren\u2019t, but a customer had reached out to ask if they could swap times to which someone kindly replied in the affirmative, supplying an email address to the actual event<\/em><\/strong> team.\u00a0 This address began with a perky \u201chello@\u201d. Joy! No sign of a \u2018donotreply@\u2019 anywhere. I breathed a sigh of relief.\u00a0 This is who I needed to direct my request to.<\/p>\n

I conveyed our plight and received the following delightful<\/strong><\/em> reply.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

A HUMAN! WHO HELPED! HOORAY!\u00a0 The confidence and warmth that I had experienced in anticipation of the event, that the re-booking experience had eroded, began to gently glimmer and reemerge.\u00a0 The money reappeared in our account in 3 different transactions, which all amounted to \u00a37, but made me think that it wasn\u2019t easy for someone to refund us the difference and that some kind of \u2018fix\u2019 had to have been applied. Regardless, the \u00a37 had rightfully been returned and I had notched up another successful consumer conquest!<\/p>\n

But I wonder how many people just accepted the increase in price. I wonder how many people gave up at the first attempt to ask for the price difference back. I wonder how many people gave up at the second.\u00a0 Not everyone is as determined as me. I know this.<\/p>\n

I know amazing services. I know what they can provide organisations. The customer loyalty, the consequent ability for growth, the beautiful connection between service excellence and organisational innovation (I should write more on this) and in lots of our services, we do have choice. We can think to ourselves \u201cThat was awful, I\u2019m never going to use them again\u201d, switch provider, tell our friends, write a blog about the experience, but the problem with lots of our commercial service expenditure is that we don\u2019t have any choice. \u00a0(I am absolutely not suggesting that public services should be turned into commercially competitive choicefests by the way, we just need public services (and I count things like trains, electricity, water, healthcare etc as a public service) to just work and be the best that they can be.\u00a0 Here, I’m talking about commercial services where we absolutely should have a choice.)<\/p>\n

If we wanted to go to that event, we had to buy the tickets with that provider. That\u2019s why they can use \u2018donotreply\u2019 emails when they respond to customer contact in a way that completely ignores what the customer has asked of them. I don\u2019t know what I can suggest which might encourage them to adopt a different approach which has obviously been introduced to reduce the need for employing staff and hence lower costs.\u00a0 They don\u2019t have to do anything I suggest because they have all the power. My only hope is that maybe the event organisers consider using a different vendor in the future I guess?<\/p>\n

What I do know is that where we do have the power within the services that we<\/em><\/strong> run, we must remember that humans ultimately want to interact with other humans. I don\u2019t mind interacting with a bot if it listens, helps me and doesn\u2019t try to pretend that it\u2019s a human<\/a>, we know AI is good and getting better and better and better, but when it can\u2019t help, please, PLEASE, let me talk to another human being and let them have the autonomy to empathise with my plight, and critically, let them have the tools and jurisdiction they need to be able to help me out.<\/p>\n

As John Seddon<\/a> would advocate, we need to design services that absorb variety, and the best way to do that is to best equip the front line of the service to listen, care, and be able to take appropriate action. And that’s what humans are brilliant at. Well, most of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I kicked myself about how I ended my last, more lighthearted, \u201cAngry Lemons\u201d blog because I missed a really obvious loop back to why protecting the humanity of our expressions, […]","protected":false},"author":151,"featured_media":1097,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[68,12,6],"tags":[29,56],"custom_author":[44],"class_list":["post-1096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life","category-operations","category-service-improvement","tag-customer-service","tag-service-design","custom_author-sarah-lethbridge"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/554\/2024\/12\/Hands-care-humanity-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/151"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1096"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1096\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1118,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1096\/revisions\/1118"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1096"},{"taxonomy":"custom_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/custom_author?post=1096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}