Mercury Call Centre

The Sunday programme yesterday had the tapes from Mercury’s call centre with relation to the Muliaga disconnection.

While there is no one factor which caused Mrs Muliaga’s death (for which the exact cause of death is still unknown), I have previously said there were many many ways in which it probably could have been avoided – some the family’s, some Mercury’s, and some the DHB.

The Sunday programme does not show the call centre in a good light. The call centre operator refused to arrange a payment schedule for the account as it is overdue. That is stupid as basically only overdue accounts need schedules to catch up payments. Mercury should be more flexible than disconnecting after less than 60 days, when part payments have been made.

And the refusing to deal with the husband when he has said the wife is in hospital is also remarkably inflexible. The Privacy Act is not a straitjacket. And it is unclear if they did note down the account holder was in hospital – something that might have stopped it going on a disconnection list.

Finally there was what one could only call the callous refusal to reconnect electricity, even when told of the death, citing the need for the bill to be paid in full.

None of the above reflects well on Mercury. I by no means advocate that one should not allow people to pay their bills, but I have actually worked in credit control for a corporate and know that one can handle it better than Mercury did.

Now I don’t blame the staffer, as presumably she was following strict procedures. But it does raise some issues of culture with regards to whether or not you allow staff discretion or not, or they are just their to follow a handbook.

There are certain businesses where you do not want the staff to have any discretion. There is a global handbook of best practice and you follow that without deviation. No initiative or discretion needed. The best example of this is McDonalds – they provide an excellent service by being uniform the world over. You want a Big mac to be a Big Mac where ever you are.

But other businesses are not suited to this model. Refusing to give staff any discretion results in poor customer service. As an example I will try to avoid staying at Sky City in Auckland anymore after horrific treatment of a group of directors (including myself) who were staying at the hotel. We had been out at a function, and got back in around 10.00 pm. We wanted to grab just a quick dessert. The hotel reception was great and tried to get us into various restaurants but they were all closing or full. They then had the idea to go up to the sky tower and grab coffee or desserts up there. They made the booking for us.

But then when we got to the tower base, the staff tried to charge us $15 for going up, as we were not having a full meal. We explained the hotel reception had arranged it and said we did not have to pay, how we were all guests at the hotel, spending $2,000+ and all we wanted was a coffee for under $20 – we were not trying to sneak a free ride up.

Now a staffer with discretion should have looked at what we were wearing (suits), the time, the fact we said they could check our story out and let us up. Instead we spent 20 minutes waiting at the bottom as manager after manager was consulted on whether to let us up in the lift (something which had a zero cost to them). Finally they said we could, by which time half our group had left.

But then it got worse as we got to the restaurant and they said they can not just do us coffees, and in fact could nto even do us a dessert only menu until it starts at 11 pm. Now the restaurant was empty, we were there wanting to spend money, and because of some stupid rule, they were refusing our money. I suspect the owners would not be happy if they knew staff were making it so hard for us to spend a reasonable amount of money. So we had a choice of paying $45 for a dinner and only having the dessert part of it, or waiting even longer.

Finally we went down a level to the bar and the wonderful man there said he could do us some coffees and bar snacks. Great – but by now we had spent 40 minutes trying to do such a simple task. We all resolved to never use Sky City again if possible (and between us and our orgs we would have an annual spend of over $20,000 I would say) if they have a culture where staff don’t use discretion to bend rules, when it is clearly a win-win to do so. It was shocking customer service.

I suspect the same problem may exist at Mercury. Call centre staff need to have discretion and flexibility unless you are running a McDonalds. Yes some of them will make the wrong call sometimes, but over time more of them will make the right call.

Going back to my days in credit control (it was for Wellington Newspapers) we had massive discretion as to what arrangements we could enter into, and we were just 20 year old students. The credit controller would talk through some of our bigger calls (such as when I threatened to black list every Woolworths store in NZ because one store would not pay 🙂 but they gave us discretion and trusted us.

Ironically it is clear that the contractors who do the actual disconnections are given and do use discretion – the Muliaga contractor used it the same day he disconnected them, for a family with a sick child. As far as one can tell there was a communications failure that day, and discretion would have been granted if it was understood about the oxygen machine needing power.

But the discretion given to contractors needs to extend to the call centre also, and credit control. Disconnection should be a last resort not merely a replacement for an account overdue sticker.