Lost – A lesson in what NOT to do in customer service

Posted by Luke Owen on Mon, May 24, 2010

desert island Lost – A lesson in what NOT to do in customer service The show Lost, which had its finale last night, provides us with some important lessons to be learned. Some scientific, some religious but for the purposes of this post, the lessons are about what NOT to do when approaching customer service at your bank or credit union.

There’s no denying that Lost was a successful show. With the first three seasons reaching an average of 15 million viewers per episode, countless number of fan base websites, forums and meet up groups, this show was a monster when it came to creating loyalty. But looking closer, you’ll realize how the producers went about creating this strong loyal following. In comparison between the producers strategy and the strategy of some of today’s banks, you can see some similarities. For example, they kept coming out with shiny new plot lines (products) for their loyal viewers (customers) to talk about, and just when a new plot line was getting old and losing its muster, the writers (product developers) would think of a new story to tell.

The problem with this model is that when the loyal customers come to you looking for solutions to issues they may have with past products or services the powers that be don’t even know the answer. They’re too busy working on the next new product instead of focusing on making changes to existing ones based on customer feedback.

Spoiler Alert

The finale of Lost has been seen as a let down by its loyal fan base. With so many storylines in place, the end left us with one answer, the survivors of Oceanic 815 were all dead and they needed to find each other in the afterlife in order to continue moving on to ____ (heaven, hell, who knows). While the show was a great ride, ultimately, they left with too many unanswered questions. The producers walked away with both their wallets and egos inflated but left those who kept them going all these years in the dust. Sound familiar?

Plot lines in a story like Lost are by no means a perfect comparison for financial products and services. But with all the potential regulatory changes (most notably Reg E) coming out of Capitol Hill, many institutions I’ve talked to are already at the drawing board thinking up of new products to counteract the potential loss in revenue that this new regulation will most likely cause.

What they should be doing is listening to their customers. By doing so, they may realize that they don’t have to rethink the wheel on their core product set to be successful. By opening up their communications, making it easier to have dialogs with customers and being more transparent, they can avoid a similar backlash that the creators of Lost are experiencing today. This is a simplistic example of what I’m talking about, but in the Banksimple.net blog, there was a post titled “How do banks work?” In plain English, they described perfectly how banks go about making their money. This simple yet effective approach to transparancy goes a long way with your customers.

As for the producers of Lost, they’ll eventually be forced to come out with a movie to make up for their lack of transparency. They’ll be forced to tell us why they introduced a whole group of people that called themselves the Dharma Intiative, what was the purpose of the “Others” and why did they know how to speak Latin, and finally, tell us why the islands survival is so crucial to humanity.