Poor Data Hammers Customer Service. Here’s What To Do

The United States is in a data quality crisis. This impacts everything, from productivity to AI. Here I’ll focus on the impact of bad data on customer service, which is also in crisis. I recently got a firsthand look at the problem, which I’ll use to illustrate the issues and propose some “getting started” steps businesses should take to address them.

My troubles started simply enough: I had written my credit card company a check for the full amount due. However, the company had only credited me with a tenth of that. Then, it tacked on some pretty significant interest charges, which I only learned about when my next bill arrived.

I called customer service, eventually getting through to an agent. I don’t think that agent believed the company could possibly miscash a check, but the agent promised to get higher-level support and said the company would get back to me in three days.

When that didn’t happen, I called again, eventually speaking to a supervisor, who was kind enough to refund the interest charges. That refund appeared about three days later on my account as a “courtesy refund.”

At this point, my biggest issue was the miscashed check. I requested an email stating that the company would not attempt to recash it. Seems reasonable, but the supervisor informed me that they could not send such an email.

My second biggest issue was future interest charges. Again, the supervisor couldn’t do anything about that. When my next bill came, I had to contact the company again. This time I tried the chat feature. I was passed from a bot to a person to another person who “specialized in interest rebates.” This experience was equally frustrating, but at least the matter now appears resolved.

Let’s dig in a bit further: First, all this started with a simple data-quality issue: not reading my check correctly. Resolving such issues is always difficult and companies are loaded with them. Those that customers see and experience are particularly damaging because they can hurt the business’ reputation. The reputation hit grows exponentially when the company doesn’t deal with the error immediately, as in this case.

The only real course of action is to make as few errors as possible. Businesses should put in place a set of processes to measure the frequency of such errors, get to the bottom of them and make changes to make them less frequent.

Second, notice the enormous costs in terms of time. I probably spent four hours on this issue. And even if a business doesn’t give a whit about its customers’ time, bad service costs it money. Businesses should have in place processes that analyze customer interactions to determine which are “value-added” in the sense that the customer walks away with something useful. That didn’t happen here. The effort may have been necessary, but constitutes “non-value-added” work.

Third, a company not getting back to a customer as promised is simply awful. Businesses must do what they say they will.

Fourth, semantics matter. The term “courtesy refund” rankled me the most. Is it a courtesy to incorrectly charge me interest and then make good? A courtesy to waste my time? Something else? I just don’t see the courtesy here. It makes me think the company sees me as something other than a real live person. Businesses that care about their customers should strive to experience every aspect of service as the customer does.

Fifth is the disempowered customer service representative. Failing to give workers the tools to solve customers’ issues wastes everyone’s time. Businesses should give their representatives wide latitude to understand and meet customer needs.

Sixth, there’s the missed opportunity. I’ve been a customer for over 30 years and have never once not paid the full bill on time. This company could have noticed something odd the moment it cashed my check for less than the full amount and reached out to check on me. Doing so would have saved both of us a lot of time and trouble. And an expression of concern might have led me to trust them more.

Finally, is lost revenue. Suffice it to say I’ve acquired a new card from a different company. So the offending company is already losing revenue. I wonder if it has noticed. Or cares.