By James A. Baker
Founder and Chairman
Baker Communications
January 2012
We all know that what good customer service really boils down to is whatever you do to make the customer happy. Logically, then, it would seem that bad customer service is whatever makes the customer unhappy. When you think of bad customer service, you probably think of someone being rude or dismissive to a customer, but remember that customer service involves the entire customer experience, not just direct interactions with service personnel. A bad experience for the customer can result from a number of poor decisions made by the company, usually in the name of saving money or making a profit.
These corporate policies and practices may result from oversight or inattention on the part of management, or be deliberately put into place. Many such decisions actually make good sense to the bean-counters, but have disastrous effects on your bottom line. Here are the top five bad choices that negatively impact your customer service:
Using Automated Systems Instead of People
The economy is tight, and you’re trying to save money. Thank goodness for touch-tone menus, self-checking lanes, and automated customer satisfaction surveys. You won’t have to pay people to man the phones, check out purchases or stand around with a clipboard asking questions. However, you will lose a lot of opportunities to deliver warm, personal service. You may try to sell these advances as “convenient,” but your customers know full well that when a machine answers the phone or they have to check out their own purchases, these systems have not been put in place for their convenience, but to reduce your staffing costs. This makes your customers feel undervalued.
Making Customer Support Hard to Reach
You can’t afford to pay a bunch of customer support people, so you just make customer support difficult to get. You set up your website to redirect customers to the FAQ when they look for customer support, because after all, there’s no reason to employ someone to help with problems that customers can fix themselves. Your website has no contact page, or if it does, it’s just an e-mail form with no direct address provided. The first thing your automated e-mail reply does is suggest that the customer check the FAQ on your website. If anyone actually manages to find a phone number, they will get an answering machine. It also suggests that they check the FAQ. By this time your customers have given up in frustration, and while you haven’t paid anyone to help them, they almost certainly won’t be coming back.
Making Customers Jump Through Hoops
You are oriented towards getting as much as you can from every customer, and keeping every dollar you get. Your store is built like a one-way maze to ensure that customers wend their way past every single product and through every department. Your return policies are draconian. If you’re a service provider, you lock customers into contracts and charge exorbitant fees for late payment or termination. Then you wonder why you have so much churn and so few repeat customers.
Not Rewarding Customer Loyalty
You are trying to expand, so you offer great deals for new customers – low rates, discounts, free installation, store credit. You run campaign after well-publicized campaign trying to woo people with fantastic bargains. Meanwhile, your old, loyal customers keep paying the same rates they always have – at least until they leave because someone else offered them a new customer discount. Whoops.
Using Poor Service Personnel
You’re trying to keep your overhead down, so you’ve outsourced everything you can. You have a few in-house customer service agents, but you don’t really have a training budget anymore, and they’re inexperienced, entry-level people. They were cheap to hire, but you don’t trust them to make any real decisions – they have to call in management to take any action. Untrained, outsourced, unmotivated, and unempowered service representatives don’t benefit your customers’ experience. If the people who are supposed to provide service are unwilling or unable to actually help your customers, what’s the point?
Anyone can make a bad choice, and poor decisions can be made by any size company, especially in the name of saving money or making a profit. The irony is that treating customer service like a cost to be cut actually eats into your bottom line in the long run. There is no asset like a loyal customer, and the surest road to customer loyalty is warm, personal, effective customer service – which means doing whatever you need to do to make them happy. Don’t worry – your investment in customer service will pay for itself!
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