Reducing customer service call volume at Expedia

Instead of looking at and understanding why customers were calling in, they decided to outsource management of support to a company that specialised in cutting down the costs.

The methods they employed had employees required to reduce the average support call duration, much like it suggests Expedia started out doing. Employees that didn't hit or beat their average call duration targets got put on a performance improvement plan, and then ultimately laid off.

That average call time was then steadily reduced in stages. It was a great success, the average call duration dropped rapidly. What was happening was employees would "accidentally" disconnect customers if they came close to the target call time. Or just randomly drop calls early on if they were worried their average was too high. Customer dissatisfaction was significantly higher. Call volume was higher (but not everyone bothered to call back). Average call duration was down though, so big success! Customer retention was getting worse, but that, of course, was tracked under a different silo by a different team who had nothing to do with the support org.

At one stage, they actually dropped the target average call duration to less time than it took to reboot a NTL router / set top box, which was the very first thing customers were advised to do by support agents. They did finally notice, then, but their only solution was to increase the time by 30 seconds or so.

Give the wrong people at the wrong level the goals, and you're going to get poor results.

For example, if 58% of your customers are calling in to have their itineraries resent, that's awesome for the company because that's a lotta volume (and volume is money!) and it's really easy to hit KPIs for call length, satisfaction etc. They are thus doubly negatively incentivized not to do any upstream resolution: not only would they get paid less, but all their KPIs would plummet, because the remaining calls are now on average harder to resolve, take longer, and have more grumpy customers leaving bad CSAT scores!

If there’s ever a problem, Expedia will claim time be “just a middleman” and you are screwed. I never got my money back and had to find another hotel at 11pm.

P.S.: If you check their twitter feed, you'll know what I am talking about. It is also an engineering failure from the get-go. Not being able to retrieve your itinerary online is an engineering failure on so many levels.

At its core, it's the alignment between customer experience and product. Support as the customer facing representatives need to be empowered to convey the shortcomings of the product as it impacts customer experience. The product team in turn should then digest that information and relay it to the people building the product, the engineers in this case.

Good alignment/synergy etc. between those teams leads to good customer experience.

My support team calls it "support deflection" (in terms of how it impacts support). "Upstream solution" (from the article) is roughly equivalent, from a different perspective.

The challenge that we face as support professionals becomes existential, once we've mastered deflection. As the article points out, it is very hard to measure that type of success.

The less reliance customers have on support, the less important support is to the company's success. The less important support is to the company's success, the less support is valued.

If fewer support requests come in for an extended period, then the support team will be downsized.

If a company is around long enough, surely undervaluing support services will likely catch up with them as new features and eventually new products are rolled out, and support professionals can only hope that executives are far-sighted enough to recognize that.

The problem that I've been stuck on for a while is how to align company interests with the support team's best interests, long term. Solving customer problems "upstream" is essentially fighting against ourselves.

One of my flights was cancelled by Air France and Expedia informed me about it and offered 2 alternative flights or partial refund. To communicate my choice I had to call their support in IE or UK. This is not easy when one is in Indonesia in a remote place. They refused to communicate over email.

So I got a skype subscription and called them. I told them I wished to be refunded because none of the alternative flights offered were compatible with my schedule and they were not able to offer any other flights. They said ok but were unable to tell me how much I would get refunded. They also said I would be receiving an email confirming the refund in 2 days. I received no email, I called them back and asked if my refund choice was registered in their system and if I could get a proof of our agreement for a refund eg. via email. They assured me an email would be sent shortly. It has now been two weeks and I have so far received no refund nor any email or other proof that we have agreed on a refund nor do I know when to expect this refund or the amount.