Here’s a thought. How about customer service?
Having worked with a number of marketing and customer service managers over the years, I have seen first hand how many companies approach customer service, and just want to make a few suggestions. While some of these suggestions may be considered impossible against the reality of constrained budgets and limited manpower, they are nevertheless my impressions of what is wrong with customer service implementation. The phone maze must go. Everyone on the planet at one time or another has been sitting on hold, listening to Muzak for twenty minutes or more, only to be told that they have to be transferred to another department to resolve their issue and repeat the Muzak cycle again. This type of automated phone maze is crippling customer support. Every customer service rep has to deal with irate, sometimes enraged customers demanding some level of satisfaction for having to put up with this crap. Embattled CSRs, having put up with this type abuse day-in, day-out become calloused to the concerns and issues of customers, creating a negative customer service experience and contributing to customer service rollover. Solution? Limit automated phone loops to five minutes with callback options, extend customer service hours, or hire more people. Customers are more understanding that CS is busy and to try back later, than to be kept hostage on the phone. A customer support website is not customer service. Too often, corporations will rely on websites as their main support buffer from customers, while pairing down on CSR's in order to shave CSR costs, or outsourcing CS altogether. This has become endemic to many web-based companies and carried over to corporate America. However, websites are not customer service, they are customer support! A broad majority of consumers are not really computer or Internet savvy. Being able to download a PDF of a manual is a good option, but should not be the only option, especially since “what’s a PDF?” is not that uncommon in the general public. Having been in advertising/marketing for years, I am keenly aware of the millions of dollars spent in print, television and direct-mail to gain new customers and have genuinely admired the branding strides many companies have made over the years. To be fair, websites do offer a good amount of information and access regarding customer support, but in the long run the critical flaw will be - customer support is not customer service. Branding, sales and revenue streams are only as good as your customer retention. Abandoning customers to fend for themselves at a website is an injustice and counter productive to maintaining customer loyalty or retention. My suggestion? When planning customer service, allocate some of the money you spend on direct-mail promotions and marketing and spend it on serving these customers before they actually need your support. Send them printed, informative documentation regarding their services- don't make them come after you. Cause when all is said and done, the expediency and cost effectiveness of the web chat, e-mail and 800 numbers on the web site are only making up for poor customer service to begin with. These are but a few opinions we have regarding customer service. I guess if you were to distill down our argument it would be something akin to, “Ask not what your customer can do for you, but what you can do for your customer.” |
As
corporate America moves into the 21st century a disturbing trend has
taken hold in policy towards customers and customer service. The decade
long trend of downsizing customer service budgets and departments have
been creating a considerable amount of frustration and negative consumer
perception for many of today's biggest corporations, which I believe
has been having adverse affects on customer retention.