Posters & Imposters of customer service and experience

There are plenty of smooth talkers and imposters of the customer experience, travellers and patients, and not all of them are ill-intentioned. Sometimes it's the execution that has compromised the customer experience, or KYC (Know Your Customer), or human error. How can we recognise them, get reimbursed when possible, and facilitate a form of ecology when it comes to speaking out on these subjects, which have become chestnuts?

Some brands promise to take care of the customer or employee experience, to deliver a memorable moment, and fail to do so. It's up to each of us to describe the stories that follow as we see fit: poor execution, falsification, deliberate deception, seductive storytelling?

For example, the dream of shopping without a checkout just got a little bit further away. Twelve years after trying to sell it to other retail players, Amazon is calling it a day. What's more, the system would have been based on a relocation to India disguised as an AI miracle. A little lie from Dilip Kumar, VP at Amazon AWS.

At Fnac on the Champs-Elysées, you can contact the shop manager, Jérémy Jacquot, directly to discuss a subject related to the shopping experience and hear the voice of the customer. We tested it for six days. It didn't work. What's going on?

At Air France, a passenger who had been upgraded and had paid for it, and his disabled mother, were turned away without explanation in Eco class. Not a word of apology. More than thirty high-level executives are in charge of the customer experience, on board, on the ground and in the lounges. What does this "army" do? 

Klarna is talking rubbish about the virtues of generative AI and its impact on customer service. Teleperformance has seen its share price massacred. Nobody has checked anything. Yesterday the share price of the world's number 1 company recovered 13%. The facts are stubborn and so are the figures.

Smooth talkers and real doers
Céline Forest, Raphaël Krivine at Axa, Fatie Toko (La Poste) Marine Deck, Alexis de Prévoisin, Mary Portas and many others are writing, posting and podcasting about the customer experience, patient, on Linkedin and at parties. Fighting to be named Customer Relationship Manager of the Year. Who among these speakers has actually done or tried anything? We've read their books, scoured their Linkedin posts, questioned their customers. We tried to distinguish between the doers and the others.

We also went to interview a discreet guy, a boss of just over 50 years, of whom thirty or so have been dealing with these subjects, a customer journey doer, just back from Singapore: Charles-Emmanuel Berc. Why does he believe in Africa as a laboratory for some of these issues? Why does he believe that the employee experience and benevolence that are always being talked about are often just a cover-up? 

Les petits stratagèmes. When Emile Ajar inspires Télérama?
When Télérama, France's leading cultural weekly, has its subscription renewal letters, sent out in their thousands, signed by a ghostly director of subscriber relations, Lucile Clément, are we dealing with a little trick, a stratagem, a posture of personalisation? Are these postures an illusion?

One thing is certain: the communications departments of the companies we mention in this survey are not very tempted to explain what's going on and who's doing what, when things go off the rails or when they need to explain a little what they've written in the press release. A case in point? In five months, we haven't been able to talk to Fabien Pelous, Senior Vice President Customer Experience at Air France. Customer care is time-consuming.  

The talkers, carriers and imposters of the customer experience, patient. A feature to be discovered in issue 9 of the Cahiers de l'Expérience Client.

There is also another survey on a key concern of the moment, at counters or in retail: how to train and prepare staff for incivilities and inappropriate behaviour? Mastering Krav Maga is not necessarily useful, but the right posture and the right words are, because everything often happens in fifteen seconds.  

Front page photo: Elisabeth Holmes, the famous founder of Theranos. From 2003 to 2018, the founder of Theranos claimed to have developed a technology for inexpensive blood tests. In 2015, her company was valued at $9 billion. All that blew up, none of it was true!