When I first moved to Germany some 15 years ago, the telecom environment was dramatically different than today.  There was only one provider for telephone service and although the telecom infrastructure was absolute tops, customer service was what you would expect to receive in a monopoly environment – abominable.  Not only did you have the honor of paying for your call – toll free numbers still aren’t quite the rage in Germany – you were usually treated like fingernail dirt.  Every interaction was a test of nerves and they made so many mistakes so consistently, that I came to believe that the mistakes were deliberately programmed.   No organization could be so thoroughly and consistently incompetent.

Later, with Deutsche Telecom as a customer and business partner, I experienced a sense of indifference that is unique to this day.  It was on their premises that I heard the phrase “I can’t use that tool because I haven’t been officially trained on it” for the first and – thus far – last time.  The tool in question was a basic network analyzer, not something terribly complex or dangerous.

Once competition arrived, Deutsche Telecom seemed spend all of their money on marketing.  They came up with a beautiful logo, wonderful advertising and a state of the art web site.  They also promised things they couldn’t deliver.  They were in the boat with everyone else promising 16M ADSL, but only delivering 3M while the competition’s throughput often clocked in at over 10M.  Granted, their 3M was rock solid, but so was the competition’s 10M by that time.

In spite of everything they did to give a high gloss to their presentation, every interaction seemed to be an attempt to keep as many customers as far away as they possibly could.  That is why it came as such a significant surprise to have a customer experience with Deutsche Telecom that was not only good, it came incredibly close to industry leading.

The first clue that something had changed was that I no longer had to pay 12 cents per minute to call their help line.  It was now a toll free number.  The second surprise was a speech recognition system that actually worked.  Note, I didn’t say voice response, I said speech recognition! I speak with a very heavy American accent and the thing understood me almost flawlessly.  Lufthansa tortured their customers with a speech recognition system a few years ago and it was a horrendously frustrating experience, so I assume it was no small feat for Deutsche Telecom to ensure that their system had a high success rate before unleashing it on the public.

As the interaction progressed, the surprises just kept coming.  Friendly and knowledgeable customer service professionals worked my issue through with courtesy and respect.  Technical staff actually called me back and didn’t have any of the old arrogant technocrat mentality.  Best yet, things started working again even sooner than I was promised.  And in the end, I was changed from a ‘Deutsche Telecom customer in spite of everything’ to a ‘Deutsche Telecom customer who would recommend them to anybody who asks’.

In about a month I’ll be moving to Switzerland.  It will be interesting to learn how well the Swiss are dealing with a competitive market.  Hopefully they won’t be stuck where Germany was for so terribly long.

What does this have to do with your Customer Service?

Every market has their bottom feeders.  These are the companies who somehow scrape by and survive in spite of their own consistent attempts at corporate suicide, or are the 12 month wonders who arrive on the scene with amazing promises and vanish in a wisp of smoke once the market learns that they cannot deliver.

Deutsche Telecom was such a bottom feeder.  In spite of a significant technical advantage they bled customers on a massive scale.  I assume the competition simply laughed, learned and grew market share as they easily side-stepped any Deutsche Telecom market advances.  One could say that as a former monopolist they by definition could only lose customers, but even this has limits that Deutsche Telecom continually pushed as hard as possible.

The message is simple – respect your competition!  No matter how bad your competitors are, they aren’t dead until the chains are on the doors and the last former employee waves goodbye.  Until that point in time, and even after, they need to be respected as a market force that can wake up to disrupt the landscape.  And never forget, the closer to the end they are, the greater their desperation will be and the more likely they are to jettison failed leadership and allow a wave of fresh opportunity to breach their walls.  Watch out!