Customer Service, Big Business, and the 99 Percent

If you were wondering why Occupy Wall Street will win against big business in the long run, you only have to look as far as row FFF.

A few nights ago, my wife and I went to the "So You Think You Can Dance" concert -- I'd bought floor tickets as a surprise. We were in row FFF, which sounded FFFantastic until we actually got to our seats.

I'd say from row DDD and CCC back, you couldn't see a damn thing. And what's worse: There were rows GGG and HHH also. Those folks really couldn't see at all.

A Big Ol' FFFail

And it gets worse. A lady with what can only be described as "fresh from the gym" BO and quite possibly the scariest hair I've ever seen sat right next to us. It seemed like the perfect time to scoot over a tad to find some fresh air.

But lo and behold, the seats were bolted together.

We're talking cheapo, $40 chairs that you see in your local coffee shop meeting rooms. And they're bolted together. We were systemically forced to sit exactly in place, in neat and tidy little rows. Except they weren't so neat and tidy.

I'm not exactly the smallest fellow -- and, to be fair, neither was Scary Hair Lady. In the 15 minutes preceding the show that Scary Hair Lady was present, there were more uncomfortable moments than watching the Extended Cut of "Basic Instinct" with your mom.

All of 10 seconds into the show, I absolutely could not stand the look of frustration on my wife's face, so we snuck out and up to Section 104, where there were 40 or so empty seats and a perfect view.

Rewind three months to when I bought the tickets. I remember noting all of the fine print dealing with the venue's refund policy. The basic gist: You could do anything -- up to and including die during the show -- and they would not refund your money.

The system was 100 percent designed to force you into the kind of viewing experience they wanted you to have.

Rage Against the (Ticket) Machine

So, about five minutes after we landed in our primo new seats, we were joined by another couple. And then at intermission, three more groups of 2-3. But still, there were people in good ol' FFF (including a few new folks who'd taken our old seats). And they were still straining along.

But here's the thing: If you found the right the event staffer, they didn't care if people changed seats. Any number of them could have stopped us when we moved. We saw at least three along the way.

Despite the best efforts of the system to keep people FFFailing, you've got folks who realize that sometimes the rules are stupid and need to be broken.

How does my incredibly long detour connect us to how Occupy Wall Street is going to whomp on big business? All we need to do is look at the state of modern day big business customer support.

When you tweet @ComcastCares, you get a response within five minutes. When you call 1-800-Comcast, you usually have to wait on hold for 10 or more minutes to get an answer. I've actually waited up to four hours to have a question resolved.

In fact, a long time ago, I applied for a job at Comcast. Their online job application system did not work with Apple computers. You had to have Internet Explorer to apply. So I complained to @ComcastCares: "Dear @ComcastCares, who'd finish an application that takes three hours to complete after taking 30 minutes to find a browser it will work with?"

They Tweeted back, something to the effect of, "Yes, we know it's bad, sorry for the inconvenience and good luck."

I didn't get the job, in case you were wondering.

Happy People = Bad Business

The economics of customer support is pretty simple: one customer support representative can handle X number of angry customers per day. If all of the customer support representatives in the business save an average of 15 percent of the angry customers, then they have essentially paid for themselves and made a profit for the business.

Let's look at that from the opposite angle. A business that can field 700 or more calls a day can tell about 85 percent of the folks who call to sit and spin. Are you starting to see the problem here?

If you only have to keep 15 percent, what makes the other 85 percent important at all?

When we pay serious money for FFFreakin seats, we want to have a FFFantastic view. When customers pay serious money for your product (and, really, any money is serious money to a customer when it feels like they've wasted it), they expect you to deliver.

Aside from the occasional joker who buys a bus ticket and expects the space shuttle to somehow emerge from the garage, these folks have reasonable expectations. Yet, for big businesses, it's perfectly acceptable to let 85 percent of them think their expectations were wrong.

"Good enough" (50 percent satisfaction) usually is. But in this case, businesses don't go for "good enough" -- they go for "just don't make it worse" (15 percent).

And, in case it wasn't obvious -- 85 percent is pretty close to 99 percent. Just how many more bad experiences can a customer have with businesses before wigging out and occupying a park? My guess is not very many.

Some Rules Need to Be Broken

Meanwhile, there are people inside your organization and out who are actively looking for ways to break the status quo. They don't care why the rules exist, they only care that they should break them, since the rules are dumb. Except, they have to break the right rules. Break the wrong rules and lose any portion of that 15 percent, and the business suddenly has a cost to recoup.

If your competitors (or their employees) decide to break more of the right rules than you do, you lose. Think about that next time you're sitting on hold for customer support.

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You can find more from Nick Armstrong on Twitter and at his personal website.