Topic Tuesday #106 2014/07/29 "Customer Service"
The customer is not always right. The customer, in spite of their obvious shortcomings, is vital to any business, but seldom "right". That is one of those easy to say staff motivationals to get people to try to work with unreasonable persons. Let's be honest with ourselves...
Depending on what I'm shopping for I am a consumer armed in one of three ways.
1) I have more information than anyone should about a product or even an entire market segment.
2) I may have just enough information to be dangerous. Or...
3) I may be an idiot in search of a village.
These three positions are mimicked with astonishing acumen by the damned souls charged with dealing with customers. It is hard to determine what the customer service representative would prefer from the consumer. As the consumer I always prefer an expert on the other end of the exchange. This may be because I am a particular type of consumer. I always want to do things on my own. This makes me the over informed consumer and nearly intolerant of what I will refer to as Level 1 Customer Service. I can only presume that Level 1, hates people such as myself. In my defense, I try to bypass the lower levels whenever possible, but often the gatekeepers have a script with particular metrics and regulations that they MUST follow.
In this type of interaction, the recent kerfuffle with Comcast comes to mind {https://m.soundcloud.com/ryan-block-10/comcastic-service}, the script is terrible. The best thing that you can hope for, is someone that can figure out the best solution for both the customer and the company on heir own. This is not as easy as it sounds, as the customer is not always "right"; but they "know" they are...
This is highly subjective. The term "right" is always dependent on the point of view. From the perspective of the customer, anything the company they are dealing with does that costs them money or time is bad. As it happens, this is the same view that the corporations hold. Both are at odds from the outset, so if you find a place that treats you well, they have determined something more valuable than that single terse encounter. Repeat business, from happy customers, is good.
Oh and something else, in the information age, bad news really does travel around the world before the truth gets its pants on. Twitter has changed the face of customer service. Some interactions are what you would hope to see. A complaint with a positive response from corporate. However in the case of an airline that was not allowing a priority customer to have his small children board along with him (I thought small children were supposed to board first to get them settled... weird.) and he said how unhappy he was and that he was going to call them out (quite literally the service agent) on Twitter. So, rather than diffuse the situation by just letting the man making a scene get on the plane with his kids which seems like the actual policy, they pulled him off the plane, and demanded he deleted the tweet or have the cops called. Seriously... The airline (Southwest) gave him a $50 travel voucher for the the inconvenience, which will go to waste since he never plans to fly with them again. EVER. Now... he didn't have to vent so publicly, and shame the agent being a douche. Especially since the douche agent may have simply thought they were doing their job before hand and was then confronted with a public relations nightmare that could have had their job ended. This stresses people out! So though deplorably extortionist, I can see the desire to erase the object of their impending doom. But that could have been done by just letting the kids get on the freaking plane. The escalation was uncalled for, on both sides, in my opinion. But... his story is quite convincing. http://abcnews.go.com/US/family-booted-off-southwest-airlines-dad-tweeted-rude/story?id=24685645
Comcast, and many communication companies, seems to have an adverse reaction to actual communication with customers. The phone trees are a nightmare. I, and many others, have needed to call telecommunication providers and avoided it for months - just due to dread and not wanting to spend my entire day on the phone getting progressively more upset. This frustration is exacerbated further by knowing a thing or three about what their jobs entail. Something is wrong.
You have already done the troubleshooting steps.
They want you to go through the script again.
And again.
Oh... and again.
I have come to the point of just saying all the steps I have done and asking for an escalation immediately upon getting a human on the other end. Sometimes that works, but I am always transferred multiple times. As for the poor saps on the other end... I am sorry that you have a job that you obviously detest and seems to be sucking your life essence our of your orifices. But... I just wanted to modify my account... I either wanted to get more product from you and/or give you more money... OR... now I just want to terminate my account, and very nearly your/my life.
In the world of customer service... NO ONE is "right", but we are all mostly pissed off.