Few companies like to see wasted effort, loss of productivity, and wasted resources. Efficiency is hailed as the end goal of every organization.
But sometimes customer service is sacrificed in this quest for efficiency.
Even small businesses use automated voicemails to route phone customers to the right department. Press 1 for store location and hours. Press 2 for new orders. Press 3 for existing orders. Press 4 for accounting. Press 5 for…
By the time you have listened to 10 prompts, you’ve forgotten whether you wanted option No. 4 or 6, and you hang up to give it another try to get it right.
Sure, you haven’t wasted a real employee’s time to route that call, but in the meantime, you’ve possibly alienated a customer who just wants someone to give him a tracking number for his overdue order without it taking 15 minutes to get a live person who can look up the information.
I recently ordered something online, but my confirmation never arrived. No order number. I called the company about my missing confirmation and order number, but the automated voicemail required my order number to proceed.
Well, a missing order number is exactly what I was calling about. Regardless of what numbers I hit on the phone, I got that irritating robotic, "I’m sorry; that is not a valid option."
The company’s website didn’t list a real email address to email anyone about my issue; they just provided an online form to submit and possibly go out into deep space, never to be read by anyone. That’s not service. And I won’t order from that company again.
Sure, you can argue that those voicemails weren’t efficient, and they needed to be improved. But that’s exactly when you need real people to deliver service — when things don’t go as planned or as perfectly as the systems are supposedly set up to be!
If you didn’t have a problem that needed rectifying, you wouldn’t be calling a company in the first place. No one calls a company to simply say, "Hi, how’s it going?" They call because of a problem that needs to be addressed.
Whenever I visit a website, and there’s no phone number or email address to contact them, just an online submission form, I know they do not want people initiating contact, that they would prefer to respond to customers at the company’s convenience, not the customers’ — or ignore the customers entirely.
At a lecture I was giving once, the staff protested that if they had to respond to consumers’ phone calls or emails, they would have to hire more customer service people.
Isn’t the solution obvious? Then hire more customer service people. Don’t you want your customers sharing vital information with you so you can better meet their future needs?
And I’m not talking about instituting call centers with cheap labor as a solution.
The problem with call centers is that no one has a vested interest in resolving a customer’s issue. The reality is that if the problem isn’t fixed, it is unlikely that that particular representative will get the repeat phone call from an increasingly irritated customer.
There’s no accountability. The rep is just a voice on the phone, never to be heard from again.
If you’re a consumer, you’re all too familiar with calling a company, getting routed to numerous different people, explaining your issue for the umpteenth time, not getting anywhere except to the Land of Frustration, and tired of hearing anonymous voices telling you, "I understand your frustration; I’m a consumer, too."
That’s not service. That’s giving customers the run-around so they’ll give up in frustration and stop bothering you while the real business of the company can move along efficiently.
The most loyal customers are those who have experienced a problem and are pleased with the company’s effective resolution. It doesn’t matter how efficiently you’re routed to a service representative if that rep can’t fix your problem. It’s all about the service.
