JOBMATCHBOX

Yesterday my company’s Internet service went down.  I went through all of the drills and could not get it to work so I had to leave the office, send my employees home (we use skpe for phone calls), and convert our organization into a virtual one for the day.  Then I called Verizon’s DSL tech support line.  What happened next blew my mind.  Here is a short transcript of the call:

Tech Support Supervisor #86215: I can have someone come out there sometime in the next 24 hours.
Me: Could you be more specific?
Tech Support Supervisor #86215: No.  I can’t guarantee when someone will come out there.
Me: What do I do in the mean time?
Tech Support Supervisor #86215: You can call the business unit and ask them to not charge you for the down time.
Me: Ok, so someone will resolve this and I will have internet service again within 24 hours, right?

THE NEXT PART WAS A SHOCKER:

Tech Support Supervisor #86215: I can’t guarantee that it will be fixed within 24 hours.
Me: Huh? So when can you guarantee that I will have Internet service again?
Tech Support Supervisor #86215:  I can not guarantee that it will be fixed at all.
Me: Is this a joke?  Yesterday was April Fools day.
Tech Support Supervisor #86215:  No one from Verizon can guarantee that you service will ever be restored.
Me: This isn’t funny.  Click.

So this call got me to thinking.  Why would someone EVER want to work for a company that puts their employees in such a terrible position.  I was so put off that I hung up.  THEN I got a robo call that said “This is Verizon, your problem has been resolved.  If this is not correct please say so now: …”.  I checked my Internet service and sure enough, it was still not working.  I left for a client meeting and then returned – my service was working again.  No guy visited.  What happened is a mystery.  But what isn’t a mystery to me is that the customer service experience that I had during my effort to get my service working again and during my effort to get service initiated with Verizon was worse than what I would wish on my worst enemy.  Come to think of it I think that those people in the Department of Defense might want to hire the customer relations team from Verizon to give them some ideas about how to conduct psychological warfare.

So all of this got me to thinking.  Here is what I came up with:All companies have an applicant customer service team.  That applicant customer service team falls into one of three categories (in my book): recruiters, hiring team and the hr team.  For most applicants the experience is a resume being submitted via some awful system like Brassring or Taleo that would rival Verizon’s over the phone customer service experience.  Whenever I come across a company using one of these systems I think that they must not like people at all.  Even for companies that don’t use these systems, the most significant interaction that they have with potential employees happens in the form of an auto-response email that says that the applicant is either “being considered” or has “been rejected, but will be considered for other positions if appropriate for the next X number of months”.  Then there is the recruiter experience.  Most organizations that I know of work with staffing or executive search firms that have recruiters do much of the hunting for them so that they can coordinate interviews, scheduling, and onboarding.  The organizations that have recruiters internally typically hire recruiters who worked for the agencies.  So agency recruiters are like the people from Verizon.  Just like Verizon they probably have a few good men and women working for them.  However, most of them are in a call center and really don’t have a vested interest in improving the experience of the customer.  You are probably thinking, ‘Why is that?’.  In my experience, the answer to why Verizon and staffing agency company applicant customer service  are so bad is because these teams are managed by metrics systems and not quality systems.  A manager is more worried about recruiters hitting their numbers and banging out phone calls than with quality.  The reason for this is that the numbers game eventually pays off.  The ugly reality is that it doesn’t work for bringing in the best and brightest.  That is a major problem. 

So I would like to propose a solution for this.  Companies should start thinking about their applicant experience in much the same way that they think about their customer experience.  If they aren’t sure of how to go about doing this then they should hire an outside consultant who has experience with building a better applicant user experience.  The difference might be whether their company succeeds over time or just hits their hiring quota.