When was the last time you paid attention to how much it costs you to collect every penny?  I’m guessing that Verizon Wireless hasn’t spent much time on that – and I just wasted part of my Saturday morning finding that out.  Last year, we changed our cell phone provider from Verizon to a competitor.  One of the primary considerations was that we learned about a per phone fee – allowed by the FTC – that changed our $50/line to $70/line for “access” to the network we thought we were already paying for.  But that’s not the real topic for this post.

Yesterday we received this email from Verizon showing a whopping $0.36 balance on our account.  First off, we had autopay set up on this account, so I don’t really understand why we have any outstanding balance, but somehow Verizon wants their $0.36 and I would be happy to pay it just to stop the emails (plus, I don’t want to have a credit delinquency for less than a dollar reporting!)

I sent a Tweet to Verizon and received a prompt response with a telephone number to resolve the issue. Service win #1 for Verizon.

And then I called the number.  Service win #2 was the great attitude of the representatives I talked to. 

Service big fail?  They couldn’t do anything easily, it at all. 

The first representative couldn’t help me because she couldn’t make a credit of less than a dollar.  She escalated me to Ivan.  After confirming via email that I was authorizing him to access the account, he was able to credit the account.  Of course, because this account is closed, he couldn’t send me a confirming email.   I can only HOPE that I won’t receive another request for my $0.36.

So my question is:  was all that worth it?  Verizon just paid two (good) customer service representatives 10 minutes to resolve a $0.36 charge.  Oh, and there was the time the social media monitor spent to respond to my Tweet.  Let’s say she spent 2 minutes.  If Verizon is paying them $15/hour, that $0.36 just cost them a gross of $3 (before the burden and benefits).  And that doesn’t include the reputational cost to my Twitter followers who just saw this.

This interaction reminded me of when I was an audit supervisor.  I had a great new staff accountant on my team; he was one of those medalists for doing well on the CPA exam.  While I am all for 100% accuracy in cash, he wanted to get depreciation costs correct to the penny – on $1m of assets! 

When is the last time you looked at reasonableness of your processes?  Are you willing to lose $2.64 just to be able to have a clean AR schedule?  What are you paying for 100% collections?  If you are using automated processes, when was the last time a human reviewed the collection process? 

Automation is great, but it can’t truly be set it and forget it.  You – and Verizon – may be paying more than you think!