Good Customer Service is Simple, Yet Rare... Why is That?

I don't normally blog on back to back days, but I had such a terrible customer service experience yesterday that I thought it would be a good idea to talk about what good customer services is and how simple it can be to achieve.

Your first line of defense: auto response email and what to do with it. I am sure we have all gotten an email from customer service saying "We have received your email and someone will contact you regarding your concern within 24 hours." Fine, it's a good start. Here is where the trouble begins. The "real" response needs to have empathy and a legitimate call to action to assist the customer. I received about 8 emails last night from this company and the first email received was the auto generated one. The second (supposedly) was someone who had read my email and was responding to it. In all 4 "real" email responses it seemed as if someone had just "cut & paste" some canned responses. It really didn't seem like they understood my concerns at all.

Your second line of defense: a customer care team that is educated in your products and has the autonomy to make decisions. We've all had this experience, you call customer care and it is very obvious that you know more about the product than the person on the other end. I am sure the first argument people will raise is "Well Mike, those customer care people are minimum wage earners that don't last very long so it is very expensive and time consuming to keep them trained and educated." My response to that? How truly important are your customers? Every company tells you that top notch customer service really matters to them but they view those employees as overhead and more of a problem than an asset. Here's a crazy idea, keep the good ones and give them a raise, and hire their friends. Create a positive work environment and support them to support the customer. But that's just a silly pipe dream, it would never work. Just keep managing call volume, abandon rate and the percent of closed trouble tickets, because those are the only metrics that really matter ( I hope you can read the sarcasm in that last line).

Your third line of defense: a sales team IN CONJUNCTION with sales management that realizes a happy customer is one that gives referrals. I cannot tell you how many times I would approach my old boss with a customer issue and he would ask me if I sold them or if somebody on our team sold them. If my answer was no, he would completely ignore the issue and tell me to tell them to call customer care and let them deal with it.  Even if it was one of my customers, he was convinced that 80% of customer issues were self inflicted and felt they would often work themselves out. Here's a hint, this is a TERRIBLE way to manage a business. But since his ability to earn money was based on finding new customers and not keeping old customers happy, he ignored them. If you don't care about the customer, who will?

So here's the summary: effective email response, a solid well trained and well compensated customer care team, sales & management working together to keep customers happy. Simple, right?


Thanks for reading today


Mike S.

BTW please check out my new fundraising blog

www.40milesforautism.blogspot.com