We spill a lot of pixels on The Consumerist about good and bad telephone customer service reps (ok, mainly bad), but what really is the nitty gritty of each experience? How do we dissect the exact aspects of what make for a good and for a bad customer service call? To that end, we’ve devised two polls that hope to get to the heart of this issue (with thanks to Peter Leppik at Vocal Labs for letting us borrow the methodology from their own survey about the same). Vent your heart and spleen, in our two polls, after the jump…
(Photo: Getty)
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I am the second tier of support for a small company. I retired 2 years ago and agreed to do this part time. When one of our techs (they actually take time away from repairing equipment to answer the phone) sends a customer to me it is either a serious problem or a difficult customer. I have no scrips and must rely on my experience alone. It is not unusual to be on the phone for over an hour and for a customer to call multiple times. My biggest complaint with customers is those who will not shut up long enough for me to tell them what to do. Then after I finally manage to get in a few words, ignore what I just said and continue with their spiel. If a problem is fixed by one of my suggestions I rarely hear back so I don’t know if it is fixed or not. I have lost count of the number of times a customer has told me “Of course I checked that.” only to later find that what they had “of course” checked was the problem.
@Eyebrows McGee: Yeah, I would have been driven crazy if I were forced to stick to a script no matter what happened. Fortunately, my call center encouraged employees to know the system and do all the basic troubleshooting on their own before jumping into the script you had to click through to create the ticket. So it was easy for us to ignore the stuff that was obviously wrong.
It got even easier when I moved up into escalations (working with people whose problem wasn’t fixed the first time around). I’d normally mention the script items on the first call just to make sure the original rep had covered all the bases, but I almost framed it as confirming that they covered everything and I never sent customers poking around with wiring and stuff. Mostly I kept at the repair supervisors and managers in the customer’s area until they actually figured out the problem.
@sarah11918: The rep on the other end of the line probably had just never run into your particular problem before. Your email probably caused a good deal of head scratching at the other end (anything dealing with cross border business is pretty much always going to be complicated in unexpected ways. Your rep probably didn’t have access to any more information than that FAQ.
The fault in this case doesn’t lie with the rep (most likely), but with whoever is doing the internal documentation. This is a more difficult job than it sounds like because you have to cover all the different things customers can do with your service AND you have to make it quick and easy for the rep to find the problem they’re looking for AND the explanation has to be easy enough for the rep to grasp in about 30 seconds while the customer is waiting on hold.
@speedwell: If there is a Golden Rule for customer support, it should be, “Don’t hate your customers.”
I agree 100%, and I have to say that the overwhelming majority of customers I worked with were very polite. Many were friendly and genuinely appreciated my efforts on their behalf. Some were clearly frazzled by their experience but took the time to make it clear they were upset with the company, not me personally, which I appreciated.
Helping out the nice customers really was a satisfying part of the job. I had no trouble with going well above and beyond “standard” services for the people I thought deserved it. I got into that line of work in the first place because I like fixing things and solving problems and I like helping people out.
The <1% who were real pricks, however, were usually the best sources for the memorable stories.
“I’m continually amazed that companies are willing to give marketing top dollar, but not customer service. Why not prioritize the customers you ALREADY HAVE?”
@Ariah: Outstanding point, but you see it’s a numbers game. Look how many people verizon signed up with their FIOS Free TV thing? They’re well over a million subscribers now. They subbed out the gift redemption to a contractor who can’t handle it and now a LOT of people are pissed. But who cares?! Look how many new subscribers they added! Betcha direcTV will be shaking in their boots!
And that’s what it boils down to. Get as many customers as possible. If 10-15% of them are pissed at CSRs, so what? The other 85-90% are happy with the service and most of them never even need to call tech/CS.
Bottom line? Bottom line.
Ask Sprint about bad customer service. They’re the leaders.
How about starting with a brain… Oops! Did I offend anyone?