Well
it’s been a long few weeks. My wife and I completed a process that would make Ghandi rethink his stance on nonviolence; we moved. The entire process provided some valuable lessons in customer service.
Moving puts you in contact with customer service representatives from every facet of your life; trash removal, cable, phone, internet, electric, heating. The first thing I noticed was how true it is that good word
of mouth about your company isn’t caused by the experience you give the customer, it comes from how easy you make the process. I am astounded that, in this day and age, so many companies still don’t have a simple, automated process. For some of our services, all I had to do was log onto our account on the company’s website and enter basic information. The others? I’m still making phone calls weeks later. Take this early part of 2016 to examine, not your service or product, but your processes.
Are they really easy to use? Or are they just easy for you because you already know how to use them? My suggestion is to find a nonagenarian and see if he or she can navigate your process. If you can’t find someone in their 90s, call me; I’m about the same when it comes to technology.
The next lesson was on hearing “We can,” vs. “We can’t.” Surprisingly, the companies that have the most resources to draw upon
to help the customer often offer the highest level of nonservice. For the move, we decided to save money—and our backs—by renting trucks that I would drive, but have a moving service do the loading and unloading. We got better customer service from the mom-and-pop moving company than from the multi-national conglomerates handling our other services.
No matter how hard you prepare in advance, when the
day of the move arrives you are not fully boxed and ready. Even so, the moving folks said, “No problem, we’ll take care of it.” And a key part of their attitude was that we, the customer, were never wrong. No matter what the issue—a box not being closed properly, mislabeling, an additional truck needed because we underestimated our level of consumerism—it was never our fault. The movers simply treated everything as a condition of the situation; a problem that needed a solution, not a
scapegoat. This isn’t a lecture that the customer is always right. Frankly, I have never believed that the customer is always right, but a person can be incorrect, misinformed, or unaware, without being wrong. Throughout the entire moving process I made many errors, but I was never made to feel wrong about them, I was shown the proper way to correct the situation as well as how to avoid the same problem in the future.
Compare that to any one of the seven dozen calls I had to make to get my cable service re-connected. When I spoke to a customer nonservice rep, I was told that my service was “fully transferred to your new address.” Me being a normal person who takes things at face value, I thought that was it. When none of my services worked at the new address, I called to find out why. “Oh,” said the rep. “You transferred your service, but you didn’t
activate it.” This was one of many conversations in which I was essentially wrong. So, no matter how well the rep or technician fixed the problem, I was still left with a bitter taste from the experience.
The other misstep of the IT company was that they knew the pitfalls I was likely to encounter, but they waited until I encountered them before educating me. Imagine how many fewer calls their service
department would have received had I been given the information first. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of service calls.
Finally, the IT company was filled with “we can’t.” “We can’t let you keep your old phone number,” “We can’t provide a forwarding service so you don’t lose customers,” “We can’t make it there until next week to fix the problem.” No matter how reasonable your
excuses are for not being able to accommodate my request, the phrase “we can’t” grates on the ear of the listener. If you ever have to say “we can’t” to a customer, follow it up with “so here is what I would like to offer you instead.” Every time I told my wife about a company that couldn’t accommodate a request, she asked, “Did they at least offer you something?” The answer was always no. If a phone call only ends with the rep saying, “I’m sorry,” you will lose that customer as soon as the
first other deal comes along. A bitter pill must be followed with a taste of honey.
