Customer Service

Although most of you know or have read enough of my e-mails telling about the lack of Customer Service, I thought I'd share our recent experience to further help you understand that customer service is virtually non-existent in the Netherlands.

Yesterday we received a letter from our phone/internet company KPN. KPN is the Netherlands phone company and up till fairly recently, in US terms, was the only telephone company available to residents of the Netherlands. The letter is regarding our "verhuisen" (moving to another house) on April 6th explaining how our service will be moved and they will be sending us further info in a week and listing all the additional services we may want to add to our basic service when we move. That was sure news to us. At present we have no plans to move. Totally crazy...where did this info come from?

Our choices if we have questions or need further info are to call their klantenservice (customers service) number or go in to a KPN store. Now, calling the number would be so easy if we were in the US, but we are in Netherlands. Almost all customer service numbers in the Netherlands have a charge and for the phone company, ok this is a phone company, the charge is 10 Eurocents per minute. Yes, that's right. And what's worse is what happens when you call this, or any other, customer service number... you often are put on hold for at least 10 minutes. When the phone is finally answered, that person doesn't know the answer to your question or for some reason can't help you and must connect you with someone else. That often involves another wait of at least 5 minutes and can be followed by one or two more transfers. So, you end up spending at least 3 Euros on most of these calls.

Better to just make a trip to the mall in Zuid Rotterdam, Zuidplein, to go in the store, go to our favorite La Place for coffee and just walk around there. We knew KPN could be a long wait so planned to be there when they opened, thinking it was 10. We got there about 10 after. We take a number and find there are 5 people before us with only one person currently working. I check the door for the store hours and they open at 9:30, half an hour too late. A few minutes later a second worker shows up and it is quick to see that he is in job training because he has to refer to the other worker often when helping his client.

Then a woman came in pushing a screaming baby in a carriage. She picks the baby up, he stops crying, she interupts one of the workers to ask if this is where she can buy a new battery for a phone, he says yes. She puts the baby, who was probably 4 months, back into the carriage. Of course, the baby starts crying again and she pushes the carriage back and forth saying, "Sh", like that's going to stop him, and talks to the old lady who's the customer before us about how good he can cry and something else about his cry, they were too far away for me to hear it well. The old lady's number is called and she says to take the woman with the screaming baby because she just has to buy something. So, the worker has to go into the back room to get what the woman wants and finally it's bought and she's on her way. The entire time the poor baby cried/screamed and the woman said "sh". I told Arjan, I am the Baby Whisperer and that baby is not going to "sh" because his needs are not being met and you're doing nothing to meet them!

Which leads me to another pet peeve...and that is baby's and young children confined for hours in carriages or strollers, very few baby wearers or front carriers or back carriers, and mothers will just keep pushing, or ignoring if stopped on public transportation, a crying/screaming baby or child instead of stopping and trying to comfort them, which most times I believe involves simply picking them up. One day I was on a tram and a young baby began crying. The mother shocked me when she picked the baby up. Then I heard the mother talk to her baby and she was talking in English. That explained why the baby had been picked up!

Back to the customer service...a 3rd worker showed up and after 35 minutes our number came up and we got the guy in training. Fortunately he knew he just had to call the company and tell them of the mistake. That took 10 minutes and we were finally on our way. It was just in time
to save me from the sanity of the taping on glass sound going off constantly throughout our visit. That's their campaign by the mobile phones. Someone's taping on the computer screen for you to answer 5 questions to determine which phone is best for you in the different categories, ie. pay as you go, basic, professional. After about 2o minutes of this, I learned what it was and that if I just went around and taped all 6 screens it would get the taping to stop for a few minutes then it was running around and doing it again.

What's most interesting about KPN is that the consumer advocacy group that spotlights problems weekly on their TV show Radar, did a story about KPN and what they found through e-mails received and their own investigation was that people calling regarding new service were handled very quickly, while existing customers were put on hold and made to wait an average of over 20 minutes, all at the .10 per minute. A representative then sat at the table and said they would improve it. In November I met a woman from Rochester, NY who my friend Irine knew from the American Protestant Church in Den Haag, here for her last week of her 6 month contract. She is some specialized computer programmer person and the company she works for was contracted by KPN to come and improve their response time for customer service calls. She told me that they were so messed up in what they were doing that in the 6 months she was able to change some things, but she thought she'd be returning, or someone else, because more work needed to be done to get them customer service friendly. Interesting...

Well, I'm having trouble uploading pictures tonight so I'll be back over the weekend, hopefully getting caught up and pictures up...time to think about going to bed.