Islands in an ocean of really poor service.

In a recent blog post we looked at the idea that, despite the ongoing movement towards the use of AI and the increasing ways that companies can be contacted. Where we should be living in a golden age of brilliant customer service it feels that something has and is going wrong.

If you couple this less than exemplary service from virtually every company with the consumers growing acceptance of this state of affairs then you can see how the new mantra has become ‘race to the bottom’ and no company of any size is immune. Everyone is using any excuse from Black Friday, Cyber Monday, January, End of Season etc. to desperately rush to be the cheapest ‘XYZ’ in the segment but is this right?

Despite the best efforts of us, as SME’s it seems that those companies working hard to offer great service are increasingly becoming islands in an ocean of really poor customer experience.

Unfortunately, very recently, we have experienced this directly while dealing with an insurance company, who shall remain nameless. In this case the confused and often contradictory path that the user had to follow through their process was in stark contrast to the complaints procedure, that we were in the end forced to use, and which was slick and professional. It comes down to where you need to focus your spend and if your customer service level leads to complaints, then you have to ask which is cheaper, good service or an entire department to handle the inevitable angry customers?

To reiterate our previous blog post on this subject:

It is into this increasing gap of personnel costs instead of quality-based service, that the small business owner can become an island of calm to customers in the ocean of poor service. How?

1. Have a phone number that is actually answered. Some companies still have a telephone service, although a few actually now charge for this when it used to be free. Even these are under-manned and the time to answer is often so long that the increasingly time pressured working people run out of patience, and leave the queue long before being answered. It should be added that many leave more annoyed than when the started. A bit of a grumble soon becomes an outright public rant without careful handling.

2. If you have an email for support, make sure that it is actually monitored and a ‘proper’ answer sent. Far too often, all you receive for your effort is an automated response stream for example ‘Thank you for contacting us, we will endeavour to answer your enquiry in [add a number of days]‘

3. Actually have staff that you can train to truly support your customers. If you look at the total lifetime customer value rather than single order value or ‘churns’, then the up-sell opportunities can more than offset these costs.

By exploiting the weakness in customer service of larger companies, you can differentiate yourself and grow into a market segment by the simple action of not running straight to chatbots or meaningless email responses. This, in the end, will pay dividends as you can be that company known for really good quality products, quality service and great support – and did you notice what is missing in that sentence? – price, you have removed the need to dive to the bottom of the market.

Creatively Yours…

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