Why is everybody so shocked by Orange’s customer service quality level?

So an Orange customer received his monthly bill for internet access for a total of... 45 923€. Mistakes happen, it's not the issue. What is typical of (way) too many French businesses is the level of customer service he was confronted to when he contacted Orange:
- first call: the agent hung up on him
- second call: another agent tells him that everybody has problems, deal with it
- third call (and final decision from Orange at this point): he was generously offered a 40 years plan to pay off his bill!
Morale of the story: Orange makes the headlines with all of France ridiculing them and customers checking their contracts to see how to terminate their contracts, when they had the opportunity to handle this case appropriately and improve their image already compromised by the wave of suicides in their employees ranks (yes, too much stressed by the quality of work expected from them).

It is sadly very representative of the attitude customers can expect from businesses in this country. Who has never had the feeling to annoy the sales people when asking a question, or has never been snobbed by waiters, etc. ?

Three lessons: 1- From a business perspective, someone needs to tell them that it costs 5 times more to gain a new customer than to win a new one. 2- In a world of hyper communication, every customer interaction is an opportunity (or a risk) to make headlines 3- Treating poorly customers is just plain and pure bad karma.

It reminds me of the attitude of an IT PM in my last job who put a very low priority on improving the online user experience by arguing that "if someone doesn't understand how the site works, he's just an idiot and there is nothing we can do about it". The most ironic part is that management agreed with him and fired me for being disruptive when trying to be the customer advocate. I guess nobody had told them about the two golden rules of business: 1- the customer is always right 2- Refer to rule number 1. With this kind of attitude, no wonder their business is going down. Which might also be Orange fate if they don't make a radical change in their policies and don't start putting the customer first.


Image source: http://www.pcinpact.com