Poor service, on hold for ages, no resolution to problems? You may have a low Customer Score with the company. More companies are using it.

[GoodBytes]

More and more companies, are using a system called the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) score, to provide preferential services to customers that the company evaluates as more valuable over others. This means, that if you have a low score, and you call for support, you may be waiting for an extra long time on the phone to get someone from the company, while a high score customer may get first in line service when they call, free extras and more.

 

What is the CLV that some growing companies uses?

Well, based on the price you pay a companies service, how willing or not in getting extras, how you shop for their service, and more is all monitored, proceeded and digested to a score. Based on the score you can have varying quality of service.

 

A person that seeks the lowest rates, complains a lot, do warranty repairs a lot, are all things that may reduce this score. And reverse hold true for gaining a higher score. Joining their loyalty program, big customer, using often their service? Score will increase.

 

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Quote

Your score can determine the prices you pay, the products and ads you see and the perks you receive.

Credit-card companies use the scoring systems to decide what to offer customers who want to cancel their cards. Wireless carriers route high-value callers immediately to their most skilled agents. At some airlines, a high score increases the odds of a seat upgrade.

“There’s no free lunch,” says Sunil Gupta, a marketing professor at Harvard Business School who has researched models for calculating lifetime value. “The more profitable you are, the better service you will get.”
[...]

Everyone with a bank account, cellphone or online shopping habit has at least one CLV score, more likely several. And most people have no inkling they even exist, let alone how they are used, what goes into them or how accurate they are. Unlike credit scores, CLVs aren’t available to consumers and aren’t monitored by any government agency.

These days, companies are resorting to all sorts of data and scores to size up consumers and predict their behavior.

 

In other words and a big visual example of CLV in action are air lines. If you travel often with the same airlines, get the fancier seats all the time, get extras, and join their loyalty club, good chances that if you miss your flight one day, you'll get an excellent alternative flight, maybe even get upgraded. Go cheap and be cheap often then probably you will be told that there is no room and that there is nothing they can do, and maybe just maybe the next flight might have room for you... Now you know why some people get free first class/business class upgrade for free when they ask, and others the answer is no all the time.

 

Source (paywall): https://www.wsj.com/articles/on-hold-for-45-minutes-it-might-be-your-secret-customer-score-1541084656

MSN news to the rescue: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/on-hold-for-45-minutes-it-might-be-your-secret-customer-score/ar-BBPdiSD?ocid=ob-fb-enus-894

 

 

What do you think with the ever growing number of companies that uses CLV score?

In a way, one can say that, no everyone has the luxury to get fancy service, and already getting the basic service is a stretch to them, so already for the company to get this as a customer, while profit margins are small, it adds up, and is of course, better than nothing. While I understand companies wanting to ensure that their big customers doesn't go to their competitors, and brings a lot of money to the company, that they deserve the best service. Should a law be imposed by the government forcing companies to be able to give preferential treatment to customers?

 

[ARikozuM]

Social engineering... 

It's been happening for ages...

And never for the better. 

 

Quote

do warranty repairs a lot

If the repair can be done under warranty, it should be done under warranty. Why fault the consumer for seeking the most appropriate route? All of this screams "profit" over "customer service". 

[Dominik W]

Maybe this explains why sometimes they do nothing he asked for. My dad constantly calls T-Mobile because "he's paying too much". I don't know anything about what are good prices for carriers, but lets overlook that. So he calls them and yells at them about how they are bad and mistreat their customers. And then he demands he wants a lower price. They'll apologize like 10 times and they will transfer him once or twice and they'll say it's done. So next time the bill comes, it's lower, but another month later its back to the same. Oh the world. 

[Guest]

Its called 'Living in Australia"

[GoodBytes]

7 minutes ago, Dominik W. said:

Maybe this explains why sometimes they do nothing he asked for. My dad constantly calls T-Mobile because "he's paying too much". I don't know anything about what are good prices for carriers, but lets overlook that. So he calls them and yells at them about how they are bad and mistreat their customers. And then he demands he wants a lower price. They'll apologize like 10 times and they will transfer him once or twice and they'll say it's done. So next time the bill comes, it's lower, but another month later its back to the same. Oh the world. 

Depends. Assuming that he didn't pass limits and such, it could be a business model. I know that here in Canada, we have a communication giant, which strive with billing errors out of many customers. Their business model (although, of course they never admit to this) is on people not paying attention to their bills, and just pays it, thinking that everything is normal, or hope that you don't have time to call, and pay the amount despite being higher than agreed upon. So I don't know about T-Mobile, but they may use the same software as the one in Canada which tends to do a lot of billing errors in favor of the company, let;s just leave it at that.

[Dominik W]

1 minute ago, GoodBytes said:

Depends. Assuming that he didn't pass limits and such, it could be a business model. I know that here in Canada, we have a communication giant, which strive with billing errors out of many customers. Their business model (although, of course they never admit to this) is on people not paying attention to their bills, and just pays it, thinking that everything is normal, or hope that you don't have time to call, and pay the amount despite being higher than agreed upon. So I don't know about T-Mobile, but they may use the same software as the one in Canada which tends to do a lot of billing errors in favor of the company, let;s just leave it at that.

I guess so. 

[jagdtigger]

21 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

Should a law be imposed by the government forcing companies to be able to give preferential treatment to customers?

It should be banned IMO. Its just nuts to practically ignore normal costumers in favor of the wealthy....

[Froody129]

The Black Mirror episode...  

[Teddy07]

18 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

What do you think with the ever growing number of companies that uses CLV score?

2

I am fine with t hat because I would do the same if I had a huge business.

[Commodus]

Reminds me of one of the things that drove me up the wall with Windows PC support for a while (and is likely still the case for many vendors): this notion that the quality of support should be tied to the particular model line you get.

 

For example, I remember Dell XPS buyers having support separate from the Inspiron crowd.  Bought a flagship gaming rig?  Right this way, you'll talk to our best people and we'll practically massage your feet while we're at it.  Couldn't justify it or didn't get lucky with a job out of college?  Aw, too bad... hope you don't mind two-hour calls to someone who's clearly just reading from a script.

 

As a rule, I would only expect a special level of support if it's clearly a luxury product or service.  But if it's mainstream?  Give everybody the same level of support.  They won't become loyal customers if you treat them like garbage for not spending more.

[Taf the Ghost]

There's two sides to this.

 

1) Terrible Customers are actually negative for a company, and they're just a headache for the sake of being a headache.

2) This punishes people that actually are given bad customer service simply for getting bad service.

 

 

[AlTech]

I read into the 2nd source since the first requires signing into WSJ to read fully.

 

Based on what I've read of the 2nd source, I now feel confident that a company I used to buy from probably used CLV based on my experiences with them.

 

Honestly, I think that CLVs should be regulated just like Credit Scores and consumers should be able to find out their score from each company using it.

[GoodBytes]

5 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

I read into the 2nd source since the first requires signing into WSJ to read fully.

It's the same. MSN purchased it for public viewing on their site.

 

[YaBoiWill]

I have had several experiences of this both positive and negative. One company who I learnt to drive with were great at picking up the phone when you needed to put more money into your account for the lessons, but when It came time that I passed my test, trying to get the 100 quid back took about 6 calls and 3 weeks for it to finally be processed. 

I think that for some services like emirates lets say, should have a system where their clients flying first will have a different rep on the phone because they've paid 15 grand for their flight compared to 400 quid for economy.

For most services like windows support or whatever, it should all be the same, because were all complaining about how crap their systems are. 

 

[Mihle]

So if you do something they consider bad, you get bad customer service, and if you complain that they get bad customer service they get even worse customer service like a downhill spiral?

 

I don't don't like it. Don't even know if I would be good or bad score.

[Donut417]

1 hour ago, Dominik W. said:

Maybe this explains why sometimes they do nothing he asked for. My dad constantly calls T-Mobile because "he's paying too much". I don't know anything about what are good prices for carriers, but lets overlook that. So he calls them and yells at them about how they are bad and mistreat their customers. And then he demands he wants a lower price. They'll apologize like 10 times and they will transfer him once or twice and they'll say it's done. So next time the bill comes, it's lower, but another month later its back to the same. Oh the world. 

How much does he pay? Cause the lowest plan for one line is like $60. He's not going to get service cheaper than what they advertise. 

[aezakmi]

Fortunately I've learnt to fix most issues with everything so I don't have to rely on shit tier employees that don't know shit about solving problems or dumb fuck minimum wage "technicians" that think can they treat me like shit.

 

it's also true most ISP or cable customers are useless brainlets who blame everything on the support guys when they break things on purpose or by pure ignorance

[Fasterthannothing]

I see two sides to this one every customer should be treated with priority and stores should strive to have good service for everyone. The other side of this is that's not possible and shop owners have been doing this for ages. When someone walks into a shop they size them up to see how valuable of a client they are. If a rich guy and homeless guy walked into a store at the same time who do you think the manager walks up to first bingo rich guy. It's just the way it is you can't loose out on business because you spent a ton of time helping someone who spent hardly anything or cost the company money while a guy willing to spend a lot of money is on hold. I'm not saying that's good but it's how it works. Just wait till it's shared accross all the companies in the world.

[Okjoek]

This is why I try to make my life as little dependent on companies and services as possible.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

4 hours ago, Taf the Ghost said:

...2) This punishes people that actually are given bad customer service simply for getting bad service.

This may help explain why customer service at Amazxon became so horrible for me. It's not my fault that Amazon would ship the wrong items (repeatedly), do a lousy job of packaging orders, resulted in frequent breakage, and their own delivery service would damage packages or improperly deliver them. The result, however, was I now take my business elsewhere where I have far fewer problems, if any.

[mr moose]

5 hours ago, GoodBytes said:

 do warranty repairs a lot,

 

Don't know about you guys but if this is the metric they use to determine how valuable their customer is then they don't deserve customers.  The thought of being treated like a shit customer becasue they sold me a faulty product is rather aggravating.

 

I think that would actually go against them in the long run, genuinely grieved customers tell everyone how shit you are, they are the customers you have to appease the most.

 

 

[DrMacintosh]

It is just Kapatalism working as intended comrade 

[Syntaxvgm]

My ISP charged me for delivery for equipment I never ordered or received, and a monthly charge on top of that. 
Took me an hour and half to argue it away. IDGAF if it's what THE SYSTEM does, im not fucking paying for stuff I don't have. 

Just looked today, charges reappeared on same bill. Calling again

Retentions department second time in a month. Know my score is low. They told me in a round about way. 

Been a customer without problems for years. 

[poochyena]

Customers can rate companies, so it only makes sense that companies rate customers.

[Misanthrope]

This has been common practices in call centers for decades, literally. Like not all places have specific guidelines but if you're out of contract, if you've been a customer for a long time, if you're paying above the average customer, etc. Usually the customer information has big signs that say "Danger Will Robinson!" And you get to give em small credits, remove or waive fees, offer shit at a discount, etc. Just to keep em around.