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On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

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Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#161

Post by slowhand09 »

newnewpdro wrote: post #95
mehrdadn wrote: post #91

> Zeta Global, whose clients include wireless carriers, generates scores using data points such as the number of times a customer has dialed a call center and whether that person has browsed a competitor’s website or searched certain keywords in the past few days. Wait, so this means I dial a number and they link my identity to my browser to tell whether I've browsed a competitor's website in the past few days? Is th…

Did you think they weren't going to leverage your phone number in other ways when you furnished it for "improved security"?

local area code + 867-5309

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#162

Post by Scoundreller »

ubernostrum wrote: post #144
Scoundreller wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m running on the assumption that an airline only ever sells a paid ticket for at least its operational costs of that extra pax. The 1 cent paid ticket simply doesn’t (or shouldn’t) exist. But if the plane crashes, even the $2k last-minute 1st-class short-haul ticket will be a massive loss after all lawsuits are settled. If the marginal expense of a seat is $200, and you paid $1000, you may sit next to a discount fl…

Again: airline yield management is a deep and arcane art. We get glimpses of it through their public policies and pricing, and we can guess at some things through public financial statements that disclose or let us calculate their CASM/PRASM/etc. But the moral of the story is it's not as simple as "selling the seat is always better".

My response was to the statement that the “cheap seats” are very low margin or money losers.

The airline and first class ticket buyers needs the economy passengers just as much as vice versa.

With the existence of economy-only planes and lack of 1st-class only planes, I’d argue that the “cheap seats” are what makes aviation viable, rather than being a money-loser.

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#163

Post by fhbdukfrh »

lostlogin wrote: post #97
kenneth wrote: post #57

The most obvious example of this in daily life is through airlines, where the difference is pretty transparent and you get night-and-day better service by being a loyal customer. With top status with AA and UA (EXP and 1K), you connected to U.S.-based very senior phone agents right away, who always make sure to take care of any issue that arises. 50min delay on your AA flight? No problem, sir, we are rebooking you on…

In my experiece the exact opposite is done by telecoms, insurance and banks. New customers are enticed with offers not available to existing customers, and great things are offered to them. Being a customer for decades doesn’t have rewards with that group of businesses.

This is so true. You can be a customer for over a decade but you still need to continually phone and threaten to change providers in order to get the same deal they offer people who switch every 6 months.

I used to work at shaw on the data team, so I'm aware the problem is perverse incentives for selling to new clients over existing, but the cost of win-backs is so high (re-signing a previous subscriber) that you can usually streamline the affair by just asking for customer retention right at the start. The generally offer you the best deal they can right away because the goal now is to keep the subscriber in any form.

Still a massive pain in the butt.

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#164

Post by Scoundreller »

hueving wrote: post #158
babygoat wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not free to participate.

It's only like 5 minutes of your time (if that), unless you have difficulties following basic account sign up processes on a website.

Though I have seen airlines start offering 0 miles or a fraction of miles on the cheapest seats unless you pay more.

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#165

Post by jimbokun »

baddox wrote: post #98
azinman2 wrote: post #6

“Not all customers deserve a company’s best efforts,” says Peter Fader, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School who helped popularize lifetime value scores. I feel like this is a succinct argument against the idea to privitize everything — there’s no accountability nor notion of “fairness” baked in whatsoever.

I presume you're making a distinction between services from private businesses and services from the government, and I feel like there are also nearly equivalent succinct arguments for how terrible government services are for certain groups of people (particularly poor people and minorities). So, yes, you can call that a succinct argument against privatizing everything , but very few people actually advocate for that…

"I feel like there are also nearly equivalent succinct arguments for how terrible government services are for certain groups of people (particularly poor people and minorities)."

Is that argument coming from the poor and the minorities, or from you?

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#166

Post by forapurpose »

kenneth wrote: post #57

The most obvious example of this in daily life is through airlines, where the difference is pretty transparent and you get night-and-day better service by being a loyal customer. With top status with AA and UA (EXP and 1K), you connected to U.S.-based very senior phone agents right away, who always make sure to take care of any issue that arises. 50min delay on your AA flight? No problem, sir, we are rebooking you on…

> it just infeasible economically to give everyone good service

Sounds like their problem, not mine. I've experienced, again and again, needlessly obnoxious, abusive behavior from airline employees. Would it be economically infeasible for them to be polite and professional? As someone pointed out, Southwest provides pretty good service.

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#167

Post by codetrotter »

root_axis wrote: post #117
newnewpdro wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you think they weren't going to leverage your phone number in other ways when you furnished it for "improved security"?

It's even crazier than that. The phone companies have data-sharing agreements with data-providers that (for a fee) sell your subscriber data through a phone number based API (this includes name, address and other information valuable to a sales funnel, KYC, or customer verification process). Check your wireless service EULA to see that you have agreed to this.

To make the best out of a bad situation, you could perhaps use this to your advantage in the following way: If you are about to call support for some reason, spend a couple of minutes browsing competitor sites first and then make the call. The queuing system should then prioritize your call because they think you are considering leaving them for someone else.

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#168

Post by BLP4YC »

jklinger410 wrote: post #130
mehrdadn wrote: post #91

> Zeta Global, whose clients include wireless carriers, generates scores using data points such as the number of times a customer has dialed a call center and whether that person has browsed a competitor’s website or searched certain keywords in the past few days. Wait, so this means I dial a number and they link my identity to my browser to tell whether I've browsed a competitor's website in the past few days? Is th…

>they link my identity to my browser They link your phone number to a session/user along with ad networks who have stored cookies on your machine and use predictive modeling to guess at who you are/what you do. It doesn't work on 90% of the HN crowd, people who block ads/disable javascript, or just don't do a lot of traditional "browsing", but yeah.

Care to ELI5?

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#169

Post by vkou »

forapurpose wrote: post #166
kenneth wrote: post #57

The most obvious example of this in daily life is through airlines, where the difference is pretty transparent and you get night-and-day better service by being a loyal customer. With top status with AA and UA (EXP and 1K), you connected to U.S.-based very senior phone agents right away, who always make sure to take care of any issue that arises. 50min delay on your AA flight? No problem, sir, we are rebooking you on…

> it just infeasible economically to give everyone good service Sounds like their problem, not mine. I've experienced, again and again, needlessly obnoxious, abusive behavior from airline employees. Would it be economically infeasible for them to be polite and professional? As someone pointed out, Southwest provides pretty good service.

> Would it be economically infeasible for them to be polite and professional?

Maybe not infeasible, but irrelevant.

95% of flyers will use a shitty carrier to save $5, or to get on a flight that departs 30 minutes sooner.

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#170

Post by anoncoward111 »

I work in customer service. We don't have scores but we have detailed notes on every past interaction.

I don't keep anyone on hold long because I don't like dealing with people who get angry about that stuff,

But, lots of my colleagues put people on hold out of spite.

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