COS

NEWS

Hell at SFR
(not sure if it’s any better with other providers).

A young SFR customer orders a new phone on the SFR website and pays for it remotely via her credit card.

Once the device arrives at the store, the salesperson refuses to hand her the order (even though the phone she’s been dreaming of is right there in front of her)! Why?

Because she needs her mother’s physical ID (as her mother is the account holder and has been paying the subscription for a few years). Her mother lives 300 km away. The only solution is to ship the phone to a store closer to her mom’s home and retrieve it there when they meet in a few weeks (a hassle, but doable…).

But no, that doesn’t work because she also needs the payment card of the person who made the purchase!

In summary, you need the payment card + the physical ID card (+ a power of attorney if the ID is presented without its holder…). 🤒

There’s no solution other than making a 600 km round trip to retrieve the ID, then pick up the order, and then another 600 km to return the ID. Or, send the ID by mail (a risk I personally wouldn’t take 😊).

In short, the situation is absurd, and this process is nonsensical. A photo of the mother holding her ID visibly and legibly near her face + a photo of the ID itself would streamline the process while still preventing fraud (which is what peer-to-peer car rental platforms do with driver’s licenses).

In any case, faced with this unusual situation, wouldn’t it have been simpler to make an exception?
But no, of course not! Imagine if it were a scam and the phone went to the wrong person! Yes, there’s a slim chance of that happening. But now this customer has canceled her account, meaning there’s a 100% chance that they’ve lost her as a customer.
So? Do we stand to gain or lose more by obsessing over risk management at the expense of customer experience?

At COS SYSTEM, we advocate for a world where companies have more customer-centered common sense. We campaign to get teams to put on the customer’s glasses. “Change your perspective, wear the customer’s glasses”—this is the cause our new website supports 😊.