While this is true, there’s a fine line between making self-service available to those customers who prefer it, and pushing customers to self-serve. We have so many ways to pay the bill quick and easy without interacting with a representative, it makes it easier for you to make a payment.
Please keep in mind that our goal is for no one to pay this fee. The company’s response to the customer above was: Verizon, as with the others, seem pretty sure they’re on solid ground. Verizon’s 2018 revenues, for example, were $130 billion. Of course, that’s a drop in the bucket for most of these companies. And that doesn’t even include how much the companies will save on transactions in which customers have been discouraged from seeking human help. If each paid an average fee of $6.60 a month to pay a bill through an agent, that would rack up roughly $126 million a year for the big wireless carriers. Looking at a conservative 10 percent of people over the age of 65 who have smartphones, but don’t use the internet, the writer figured that would come out to about 1.6 million people. One Gizmodo writer did some number-crunching to estimate how much money companies might make off the fees. As Mills notes, it costs companies two-to-three times as much to serve a client through a human interaction as through a self-serve portal. satisfactionĬlearly there’s an economic incentive to push customers toward self-service options. As a budget airline offering low fares, Spirit is no doubt trying to offset its overhead by charging for anything that’s not strictly necessary. Strangely, there is also a discount for buying a ticket at the airport from an agent, a deal that has to do with tax laws. Spirit Airlines, for example, will charge you to have an agent at the counter print your boarding pass, should you fail to print your boarding pass at home. Verizon also isn’t the only wireless company to try charging customers a fee for live agent support, and other industries are giving it a try, too. To be fair, Verizon doesn’t charge $7 for each call only for those services it deems simple enough to accomplish by self-service, like making payments. Present Case in point, the $7.00 AGENT SERVICE CHARGE for each call.” To quote one customer ranting about the company, it is “…getting the most amount of money…while having no real sense of compassion. Judging from the comments on Verizon’s community forum (of which you need to be a member to view), she’s right. “This is the opposite of where the industry is going…” she said. “Oh no,” I thought, “is this where AI is taking us? Are we going to have to pay a premium now for human customer service?”įancy Mills, Director of Training and Content for HDI, and group training and content director for the International Customer Management Institute (ICMI), says no. That’s why it was hard to reconcile the $7 charge for the honor of paying my bill with the assistance of a person. There are whole movements around personalization, empathy, agent empowerment, and omnichannel service…. I know that sophisticated businesses are hyper-focused on making customers feel loved or recognized, and building experiences that create the kinds of connection that customers want. So I was shocked, a few months ago, when the company’s IVR bot informed me that if a human customer service agent was brought in to handle my payment, Verizon would charge me $7.
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