Palm responds, Part 1

Read­ers of this blog have recently heard about my amus­ing expe­ri­ence with the tech sup­port at Palm, where I was told by an off­shore tech sup­port lady that she was the CEO of Palm. Before post­ing the entry, I had called the pub­lic rela­tions group at Palm to try to get a few things answered. At the time, unfor­tu­nately, they were unable to pro­vide me with any answers since most of the peo­ple at Palm were on hol­i­day break for Christmas.

At the time, I fig­ured that this was a nice and con­ve­nient answer that really acted as more of a way to stonewall me. So it was with great sur­prise that I was con­tacted with a follow-up by John Moses, the VP of cus­tomer rela­tions world­wide for Palm.

Not only did John apol­o­gize for my own expe­ri­ence but he was con­sid­er­ate enough to pro­vide me with a lot of answers to ques­tions I asked (and, in a clos­ing to my encounter with Palm, he also pro­vided me with a replace­ment unit for my Treo 680). While my faith in Palm hasn’t been restored yet, I think there is a lot to pon­der in the ques­tions and answers John pro­vided me. Because there is a lot to digest, I am break­ing this Q&A into two parts: The first one, which fol­lows, addresses gen­eral issues around cus­tomer sup­port and around my own expe­ri­ence. The sec­ond part talks about the unit replace­ment pro­gram and some of the deci­sions made there.

So with­out fur­ther ado, here is the Q&A, which is not edited in any way, save for light for­mat­ting to increase readability .

Q: First of all, thanks for tak­ing the time to do this inter­view and alle­vi­ate some of the fears peo­ple may have after I posted my expe­ri­ence with Palm. The Treo 680 has been out for about a year now. As the head of Cus­tomer Rela­tions, have you seen par­tic­u­larly high lev­els of calls relat­ing to it as opposed to other palm devices?

A: Because of a spe­cial pro­gram we imple­mented and highly mar­keted this past year called 1–800 Free Setup Help, we have had a higher vol­ume of calls related to the Treo 680. This Palm spon­sored pro­gram — where we have also gained the sup­port of our major car­rier part­ners — encour­ages cus­tomers to call us at no charge within the first 90 days of pur­chase for ded­i­cated device setup assis­tance. The results have been highly encour­ag­ing and we are con­tin­u­ing to eval­u­ate addi­tional pro­grams that increase the num­ber of inter­ac­tions we have with cus­tomers so they get more out of their device.

We also strongly rec­om­mend that cus­tomers take advan­tage of the Treo 680 soft­ware updaters, as they do make a notice­able improve­ment to the per­for­mance of our devices. Cus­tomers can find these
on our web­site.

Q: It is my under­stand­ing that Palm works largely on sec­ond line of sup­port for mobile phone com­pa­nies they have part­ner­ships with and works as first line of sup­port for unlocked devices they sell. As a result, I would sus­pect that the num­ber of calls for unlocked devices is prob­a­bly higher. Is that the case?

A: You are right that for the major­ity of our phones — all of those sold through the car­rier chan­nel — we are the sec­ond level of sup­port. Our car­rier part­ners have exten­sive sup­port capa­bil­i­ties and are inter­ested in main­tain­ing a con­nec­tion with their sub­scriber cus­tomers — and we respect that. As a gen­eral rule, these cus­tomers are encour­aged to begin sup­port with their wire­less ser­vice provider, and they will in turn esca­late to us at Palm if the issue war­rants addi­tional device expertise.

There are excep­tions to this, how­ever, and cus­tomers fre­quently con­tact us directly; this most often is because they are tak­ing advan­tage of our spe­cial pro­grams includ­ing our Free Setup Help, which I men­tioned before, or our MyPalm Mem­ber­ship, where cus­tomers can receive spe­cial ben­e­fits includ­ing a ded­i­cated mem­ber assis­tance line.

For those cus­tomers who have bought unlocked devices directly from us on our web­site or in our stores, we cer­tainly are com­mit­ted to be their first line of sup­port. In terms of call vol­ume, we receive more for carrier-locked devices than unlocked ones, partly because there are just more sold, but equally so because we have a close rela­tion­ship with our car­rier part­ners which involves reg­u­lar col­lab­o­ra­tion and warm transfers.

Q: Are calls for unlocked devices routed to dif­fer­ent call cen­ters than calls for locked (or car­rier spe­cific) devices? If that’s the case, could you explain some of the logic behind it?

A: No, sup­port for both types of devices is pro­vided by the same call cen­ters, and with the same agents. Our sup­port agents are trained on all Palm prod­ucts and all cus­tomers are treated the same.

Q: Palm recently started to move phone sup­port to a pay model (I believe it’s $19.95 per call unless it results in an exchange). Does Palm look to its phone sup­port as a poten­tial profit center?

A: First, cus­tomers trans­ferred from a wire­less car­rier or a call with a basic inquiry will not be charged. Also, if a call results in a repair or if an agent can­not solve the issue, we would waive the fee.

Palm has always charged for phone-based tech­ni­cal sup­port beyond 90 days of pur­chase, based on our stan­dard sup­port pol­icy and war­ranty — this is stan­dard indus­try prac­tice for many con­sumer elec­tron­ics man­u­fac­tur­ers. We have just reduced (in Decem­ber) the cost of post 90-day tech­ni­cal sup­port (from $25 to $14.95), and when we do charge cus­tomers, the funds are used to sub­si­dize the costs of the sup­port infra­struc­ture we provide.

Palm regards the rela­tion­ship with its cus­tomers and sup­port specif­i­cally, as an invest­ment in the future, not as a profit cen­ter. We try to make Palm sup­port valu­able and afford­able to cus­tomers by offer­ing var­i­ous options, includ­ing sev­eral options that are free of charge (e.g. Online Chat).

Q: Has reac­tion among cus­tomers to the move of phone sup­port to a pay model been neg­a­tive or positive?

A: As I men­tioned before, Palm has always charged for cer­tain phone-based sup­port ser­vices. We have seen a pos­i­tive response to our new “Expert” pay ser­vices, which cer­tainly is evi­dence that cus­tomers don’t mind pay­ing a fee for a ser­vice that they deem impor­tant and that is well executed.

Q: The level of expec­ta­tions for a ser­vice one pays for is gen­er­ally dif­fer­ent than the level of expec­ta­tion for some­thing that is free. What has Palm done to ensure that the expe­ri­ence around paid calls is bet­ter than the pre­vi­ous (free) expe­ri­ence for customers?

A: Palm still pro­vides many free ser­vice options, so a cus­tomer is never forced to pay for sup­port. We also strive for and expect the best level of ser­vice for both types of calls — paid and free — as the same cus­tomer may expe­ri­ence both types of sup­port options dur­ing the time they own their prod­uct and we want their inter­ac­tions to always be con­sis­tent and of the high­est quality.

Q: I am sure there are stud­ies about user sat­is­fac­tion across the indus­try as a whole. Do you have infor­ma­tion about Palm’s stand­ing, com­pared to its com­peti­tors, in terms of cus­tomer expe­ri­ence? Is it bet­ter? Worse? What are the main issues around it and what is Palm doing to address them?

A: I can tell you that our case sat­is­fac­tion scores — those scores that rate the qual­ity of the sup­port given by an agent for a given ser­vice request — is either at the top or very close to the top of any com­par­a­tive set you will find for true tech­ni­cal sup­port on com­plex con­sumer elec­tron­ics. Of course we always believe we can do better.

We have a num­ber of teams that con­tin­u­ally ana­lyze every­thing from call cen­ter activ­ity, to web searches, to sat­is­fac­tion sur­veys in order to find ways we can sup­port our cus­tomers more effec­tively. Thank­fully, our cus­tomers take the time to give us feed­back, and we take that very seri­ously, and we lis­ten and apply it.

Q: Has Palm out­sourced its call cen­ters or are the over­seas call cen­ter employ­ees also Palm employees?

A: Yes, we have cho­sen to out­source and off­shore a major­ity of our tech­ni­cal sup­port. The tech­ni­cal apti­tude and aver­age tenure of the agent pools we use off­shore are very high. We also sup­ple­ment off­shore ser­vice with onshore esca­la­tions (which should have been lever­aged by the agents in your case). Inter­est­ingly, our cus­tomer and case sat­is­fac­tion data over the past year show that the actual dif­fer­ence between our onshore and off­shore agent ser­vice is mar­ginal — a frac­tion of a point — so we believe that we are not com­pro­mis­ing qual­ity in any real way.

Q: What kind of train­ing does a Palm call cen­ter employee cus­tom­ar­ily receive?

A: All of our agents get an aver­age of three weeks of class­room train­ing per year. This includes tech­ni­cal sup­port train­ing, oper­at­ing sys­tem (Palm OS and WinMo) train­ing, lan­guage and cul­tural skills train­ing, cus­tomer ser­vice skills train­ing, new prod­uct train­ing, prod­uct refresher train­ing, and Palm sys­tems, pro­ce­dure, and pol­icy train­ing. In addi­tion, agents reg­u­larly receive inten­sive one-on-one coach­ing and men­tor­ing using call record­ings, qual­ity mon­i­tor­ing and cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion surveys.

Q: In my own expe­ri­ence, as well as in other expe­ri­ences doc­u­mented online, it appears there have been many instances of Palm call cen­ter employ­ees lying to cus­tomers. Just for the record, though I sus­pect the answer will be no, are Palm call cen­ter employ­ees asked to lie to customers?

A: We invest a lot of time and energy in pro­vid­ing offi­cial scripts, bul­letins, knowl­edge bases, and train­ing that help agents to respond swiftly, pro­fes­sion­ally, and accu­rately to the myr­iad of con­sumer inquiries that they face each day. They are also encour­aged to use our hier­ar­chy of sup­port to esca­late calls and ques­tions when they are not informed or posi­tioned to answer — so there is no rea­son an agent should pro­vide inac­cu­rate infor­ma­tion at any time.

In your case, the agent lost con­trol of the con­ver­sa­tion, and things were said that shouldn’t have been. These types of cases result in an inves­ti­ga­tion, and often­times inter­views with those agents or man­agers involved.

Q: What would hap­pen to an employee that is found to have lied to a customer?

A: We con­duct an inves­ti­ga­tion — per­haps read­ing call notes, lis­ten­ing to calls if they’ve been recorded, inter­view­ing agents, and so forth — to get a bet­ter idea of what really tran­spired. We would then fol­low our estab­lished guide­lines for dis­ci­pline, per­for­mance improve­ment, or dismissal.

Q: Also for the record, though I also sus­pect the answer will be no, does Palm CEO Ed Col­li­gan take call cen­ter calls?

A: Ed is one of the most pas­sion­ate and par­tic­i­pa­tory exec­u­tives you will ever come across. While I don’t believe he has ever taken a tech­ni­cal sup­port call per se, he cer­tainly will con­tact a cus­tomer directly, and does so all the time. He has a ded­i­cated voice­mail box where he receives cus­tomer mes­sages that I don’t even have access to. He rou­tinely is respond­ing to not just voice­mails but emails, faxes, and let­ters that come across his desk. And Ed knows the names of these cus­tomers, and he looks to me for sta­tus updates on how we have han­dled these cases and whether or not we have restored their trust in the Palm brand. He is zeal­ous about this — and so am I.