Customer contact is a human endeavor. Even if customer service does its utmost, if the rest of the organization falls short, your customer is left empty-handed. The unhappy flow is rarely pleasant, but it does expose exactly what goes wrong when customers fall through the cracks, or are repeatedly sent from pillar to post. Customer stories: food for thought!

Many customer contact managers hang their consumer brain on the coat rack the moment they walk into the contact center. After all, their work is more about numbers than about individual customers. The responsibility for those individual customers lies with the customer contact representative.

If the customer journey derails for any reason, it is not the customer but the customer case that travels. The case then ends up on the desk – read: the inbox – of team leaders, supervisors, managers, escalation teams, or the back office. Escalation is intended to reach a solution, but there is also a chance that such a file falls through the cracks. When a customer journey turns into a nightmare, it is often a culmination of events. So where does it go wrong? And why?

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The editors would love to get in touch with consumers – which can include customer contact professionals! – who want to share their derailed customer journey. There is one ground rule: the editors ask the organization(s) involved for a response. Tips: redactie@ziptone.nl.

Youpgate: a bath in syrup – In 2010, comedian Youp van 't Hek sought publicity when he failed to get his problem (or rather, that of a family member) resolved at the customer service department of (then) T-Mobile. He made an appeal in his column in NRC and on Twitter, which resulted in 30.000 tweets and some 11.000 email messages. He used these for a one-off glossy magazine, 'De Help', containing stories about customer service. For his glossy, Van 't Hek also visited various contact centers. Read the interview (from 2010).

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