Special Reprint of Three recent exame covers stories on the brazilian economy

At the end of the 1990s, business prophets, like American Michael Hammer, began to affirm the world was entering a new era, the so-called customer economy, a sort of Eden in which all power would be in the hands of consumers. "Customers are no longer the ones begging for scarce goods. Now, sales reps are the ones desperately searching for customers," preached Hammer, known as the father of reengineering. Ten years later, his prophecy doesn't seem to have been fulfilled. Here and around the world, consumers still feel poorly served, abandoned and at times betrayed by the companies that were supposedly at their feet. Discourse that exalted a "focus on the consumer", "total satisfaction" and the

Department of Consumer Protection and Defense into a Secretary, which will practically triple the contingent of technicians dedicated to this issue. Problems are opened up to the public and passed on as if they were some virus on the Internet, blogs, relationship sites, Twitter and forums. For that and other reasons, it is getting more expensive and riskier to provide poor service. Service failures not only complicate the company's image - thanks to the Internet, furious consumers letting off steam have repercussions of the likes never seen before - but they also begin to affect cash in a more immediate and thus much more perceptible manner.

EXAME/IBRC's survey reveals that no sector irritates its customers as much as telephony - despite all the advances obtained since the privatizations. Of the ten worst ranked companies in the survey, five operate in this market. Mobile operators alone have 174 million customers combined in the country, which itself make them vulnerable to a large number of complaints. "We are the largest telecommunications company in the country and we are growing. Since we have more customers, it is natural for us to have more complaints," says Abel Camargo, director of customer service at Oi, the most criticized company by consumers surveyed by IBRC. Oi has 60 million customers throughout Brazil, who make 70 million calls to the call center every month - and 45,000 employees are needed to meet this avalanche of calls. Besides the large number of customers, heavy maintenance costs and intense competition among operators, with a frantic pace of promotions and releases that after-sales services often cannot keep up with, complete the list of possible causes for chronic poor service. "In sectors with high levels of competition, it is common for executives to be very concerned about immediate results and they cut investments in service," affirms Leonardo Araújo, professor of marketing at the Dom Cabral Foundation. "What they don't realize is that over time customer retention indexes also make a difference." On the other hand, just increasing investments without combating the reason for so many calls and complaints is like drying ice.

At the end of last year, Oi began to show a reaction. It created a customer relations directorate, reporting directly to the president and responsible for an improvement plan that should cost some 250 million reais. The main objective is to reduce so-called repeat calls, those where the client makes the same complaint more than once. According to Oi, the proportion of repeat calls to its call center is around 30%. Market analysts heard by EXAME estimate the company spends 1.2 billion reais per year just on call center service and technical support. If it does its math, the operator can save 400 million reais by eliminating all repeat calls. Oi also cut the number of promotions in half after the merger with Brasil Telecom, in the beginning of 2009. The large variety of plans not only led to confusion in the mind of the consumer, but also led to billing errors - the main reason for calls to the company's call center. (One of the reasons for the billing errors is the fact that computer systems are not always able to process the bills according to bonuses and the conditions agreed upon in contract.)

Tension in relationships between telephony operators and their customers is apparently a global problem. AT&T, of the USA, the only operator authorized to sell iPhones in the United States, is finding out what a customer revolt can cause in the worst manner possible. In December, the increasingly more frequent failures in American iPhones irritated blogger Dan Lyons, who called upon users to congest the company's lines - at an appointed time. The idea was for everyone to download very heavy applications and use the Internet to make it very clear the operator would not have the conditions to support the traffic. The initiative's repercussion was so great it led the sector's regulatory agency to manifest itself out of fear there would be blackouts of networks and essential service lines, such as the fire department and police. "Purposely interrupting the operation of a network is irresponsible and may be considered a threat to public security," warned the agency in a note. The protest was aborted, but the damage had been done. Over recent months, AT&T actually suggested the customers themselves were to blame for the problems since they use the Internet too much and download too many applications (two services, it is worth remembering, advertised and sold by the operator). Now, it is considering limiting the volume of data per user, an alternative that is generating even more dissatisfaction.

The difference between the group of companies that fared well in the ­EXAME/IBRC survey and the group that didn't is not in the lack of failures. What separates them is a combination of investments in training, technology systems that organize the flow of complaints, and most of all, greater control over the product or service being offered. Imagine a bank that due to system or employee errors disappears with an accountholders money. Or a financial institution that systematically errs in the customer's investment statement. There is no long life in the financial market for such an organization. Thus, fulfilling the contract is a matter of survival. That is a powerful explanation for Bradesco's performance, the highest ranked company in the survey. (Recently, Pro­con of Sao Paulo released a list with the champions of complaints, in which Bradesco appears in seventh.

In that study, complaints about all the companies in the group were considered, including health plan, credit card and insurance. In the EXAME/IBRC survey, only the bank was ranked first.) Today Bradesco has 53 million customers, a number very similar to Oi, and all of the complaints are transformed into daily reports distributed to all directorates. Since the beginning of the year, the most frequent complaints have been the theme of bimonthly meetings with the participation of the ombudsman and representatives from all areas involved. "These meetings give the problems a greater sense of urgency, besides being an opportunity for the areas to discuss how to solve them," says Julio Alves Marques, director of the ombudsman's office at Bradesco. In extreme cases, when a complaint arises that could represent a risk to the bank's image, it is taken to the Board of Directors, as occurred in January when a call center employee called a person who had registered in the "do not disturb" program, the Procon of Sao Paulo's unwanted telemarketing call list. "Our concern was to learn if it was a punctual error or a system problem. Imagine the damage to the bank's image if many registered persons on the list began to receive our calls," says Marques. When it is proven that an employee behaved unacceptably, as in the case of an accountholder who heard an employee at the agency call him a "jerk", she is fired.