Wednesday, January 14, 2009
How to lose customers – fast
By Mike Lake
Dear Mr. Cable Company Conglomerate CEO,
Yesterday, I was on an important business conference call. Ten minutes into the call, I was dropped. I immediately used my other line to dial back in and after 4 minutes I was dropped again. As I’ve become skilled at through years of experience, I rebooted my modem. I finally got back on the call and at the end, I complained about your company being the sole provider in this area for my cable, Internet and phone. One of the other conference attendees immediately exclaimed that he was about to sign up for your triple package. After my 3 minute rant about how abysmal your service is throughout every aspect of the organization I have touched – and I’ve got years of touching(!) – he thanked me and said he would use your competitor. Where he lives, he has options.
I realize that complicated technology sometimes goes awry. So, it is not your technology I dislike. Rather it your service. I have questions:
Why must I ALWAYS waste my time working my way up the ladder of service competence being transferred from one department to the next to the next to the next until I finally get to that really smart person who seems to hold all the answers? What’s her direct number?
Why do I need to… dial my number into the recording that answers my call, only to be required to give it AGAIN to the service person I speak with?
Why do you NOT give me the option to speak to a live person unless I trick the dial-in system by continually hitting “0″ over and over until it cries “uncle” and connects me to a live person?
Why has almost every service call over the years consisted of the technician telling me that he found the problem, only to have the technician on my next service call tell me the problem is what the last technician did?
Why must each support call I make about a dire emergency with my dead service needing to be looked at by the next level department “that handles that” end with your phone rep cheerfully asking “Is there any thing else I can help you with?”
Why do you ask me EVERY TIME at the end of a service call if I could just take a brief survey to “rate the quality of my service”? Who wastes their time taking those surveys, and do you really think that’s the way to get accurate customer feedback?
Sincerely,
A Severely Dissatisfied Customer.
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Dear Severely Dissatisfied Customer,
Please do not respond directly to this email as it has been sent via our automated responder.
Thank you for your inquiry. Your issue has been forwarded to the appropriate person and someone will get back to you within 24 – 48 hours. For additional inquiries, please email our award winning customer service at click here.
Please take our brief customer service survey to rate the quality of our service. Click here
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The point is: Every customer matters, even if you are a mega billion dollar corporation, but especially if you are a small business. News travels fast and in ways you can’t even imagine. Make it easy for people to solve their occasional problems with your product or service, make live people and phone numbers easily accessible (No, the Internet hasn’t made telephones obsolete!), and rethink your policies, especially if you consider and name them “our policy”.
You can no longer hide from bad word of mouth. Ask my friend who is now that other phone company’s newest customer!
May 16th, 2009 at 10:49 pm
Very Funny! I can totally relate to this in a major way. Good job on making a great point in a humorous way that many of us have experienced.