Do you suffer the deep pain of trying to resolve customer service problems with non-existent people at the other end of your telephone?
If you have a business, large or small, do you think your customers share the same frustrations that you have?
Why can't customer service problems be handled and solved faster, more courteously and completely? Why does it seem like we can never speak directly with a real live human being? And when we do manage to speak to a live person, why does it seem that they are speaking to us from thousands of miles away? Maybe because they are indeed thousands of miles away from the U.S.
The answer is that most companies that have customer service departments know they lose tons of money on their customer functions. To be blunt, customer service is a loser proposition. Period. Therefore for the best way to minimize the losses is to run as bare-bones operation as possible. "Too bad that a customer can't get past the electronic attendant and speak to a person. Too bad that the customer isn't happy with us--we've got lots more customers."
How would you like to have the lost dollars from just one hour of poor customer service as practiced by American companies? I guarantee you could retire for the rest of your life...and so could all of your family and all of your friends could join you as well!
My late, great friend, Ray Considine co-wrote a book called Why Are You Making It So Hard For Me To Give You My Money? Taking the first letter of the first seven words in the title he fondly called what became his passion "WAYMISH".
He and his writing partner collected at least a bazillion examples of real life stories concerning awful customer service experiences in the surreal world of customer service. My sense is that perhaps we should rename customer service departments "no customer service departments."
Recently a friend emailed me a 'secret" list of about 6 pages with dozens of phone numbers of credit card companies, airlines, computer companies etc. so as to avoid the endless minutes and sometimes hours spent on hold waiting hopefully for a person to pick up the phone somewhere in cyberspace, who might be able to help solve a problem. Why should getting actual, real, live, fast customer servce be a secret?
