Are you a Victim of Sloppy Service or Poor Workmanship?
I am!
Poor service or poor workmanship reflects company quality and brand. I leave the definition of poor service or workmanship to you to define for yourself or your customers.
I’m sure everyone has a story of poor service…
What has been the longest time you have been on hold on a phone call waiting to speak to a customer service agent?
Mine was an hour. Fortunately, the agent was able to assist me. She took the time to fix what had to be fixed and provide me with information I needed.
What was the longest time you had to wait for professional service from a doctor, dentist, health care professional?
Mine was four hours waiting for my obstetrician to see me. I chose to remain quiet because I faced a power dynamic. If I complained, I was unsure of how the obstetrician would react. Was I wrong to remain quiet? Maybe. I did ask the office administrative staff to call me in the future if the delays were long so that I could come closer to the new appointment time.
What is the Impact of Poor Service or Quality?
- Providing good customer service is what customers want, and this customer report shows that customers look for things beyond price and product when choosing a brand and are willing to spend more money for a better experience.
- According to Statistica, 42% of consumers surveyed stopped using a product or service after one bad experience, after three bad experiences consumers would likely abandon the company.
- The Global State of Customer Service surveyed more than 5,000 consumers across the world about customer service. They found that good customer service leads to brand loyalty, increases customer retention, and increases revenue.
- 86% of customers will stop doing business with a company due to bad experience. It is more difficult to attract new business than retain it. This means companies need to work at providing good customer service, quality products and services.
- Good customer service increases customer retention rates by 5% can increase profits by between 25% and 95%.
- 93% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases with companies that offer excellent customer service.
- If the company’s customer service is excellent, 78% of consumers will do business with them again after a mistake.
What Can You Do as a Customer to Address Your Concerns?
- First, be clear about what you expect from the interaction, is it support, a refund, an apology? Work towards your goal. Be nice to those on the other end of the call if you want help, otherwise you might find yourself bounced around, the call may be dropped, or, a file may not be opened or may be prematurely closed.
- Start with calling the customer support line and speaking to an agent or contacting the company online if that option is available.
- Escalate your problem and ask to speak to the supervisor or manager if your issue has not been resolved by customer service.
- Write a letter of complaint to company decision makers (President of the company, board of directors, senior vice president) and carbon copy relevant individuals. This is a last resort option. Decision makers at this level should not be addressing customer service complaints, but if the customer service area or supervisors and managers fail to address the problem, then it is up to the person in charge to do something about it. It will also provide the person in charge with firsthand information about what is happening in their company.
- Social media is excellent for getting the attention of a company. Most companies will ask for customer feedback. That feedback is valuable in that it can generate additional business or result in people looking elsewhere. There are sites you can visit to determine product quality, or service. For example, Amazon lists products and gives them a rating out of 5 stars. Google also provides ratings. Angi (formerly Angie’s List): Home Service Pros & Reviews provides reviews on home service providers in the United States and HomeStars does the same in Canada (I’m a big fan of HomeStars). Other countries may have similar types of review services available to them. These sites provide hundreds and thousands of reviews that can give you a pretty good idea of quality, reliability, workmanship and customer satisfaction.
- Word of mouth is a powerful way to endorse or not endorse a product or service.
- Ask for compensation for time wasted.
- Dispute charges on your credit card. You can contact the credit card company and ask to dispute the charges (no guarantees though). A refund is possible if you were charged too much or never received a service.
Sloppy products or workmanship are beyond our control. We can’t control staff, training, or quality but we can control what we buy or whether we use their services. There are some things that are worth addressing and others that we can let go.
If You Own the Company or Are Responsible For Customer Service Here Are Some Tips to Improve it
- Set service standards.Have an acceptable response time. It is unacceptable to have customers waiting for long periods of time listening to the message that says an agent will be with you shortly if you have already been waiting half an hour. If this is the case, you either don’t have enough customer support agents, you have too many complaints, or both. In which case, you have a big problem that needs addressing. Other examples are; set a timeframe for how long it should take to resolve a case. If a supervisor or manager has been requested to resolve an issue, set a standard for when the customer should hear back from them (the manager will contact the customer in xx hours/days).
- Make sure that your customer service agents are knowledgeable about the service or product and have access to account information. Provide them with excellent training and show them what excellent customer service looks like. Give them some authority to make simple decisions to resolve the issue.
- Provide multiple channels to resolve issues such as live agents, online chats, call back service (your position in the queue is held and an agent calls you back when you reach the front of the queue).
- Options for directing a call are important, however sometimes the customer needs to talk to a live agent. Making them work that hard to speak to an agent sends a message that says, “we don’t really want to talk to you”.
- Make sure that one of your options clearly allows for speaking to a live agent. Customers will get creative to speak to a live agent.
- Make your customer service phone number easy to find, don’t bury it in your website so that customers can’t find it. The message customers are receiving is “don’t call us”.
- Listen to what customers are telling you. No customer wants to call a company about a problem. The goal of the company is to provide a satisfactory service or product. If it isn’t satisfactory the customer has to make a call and start the process to correct the issue.
- If a customer has called back about the same issue several times, it is a clue that there may be a problem with the product. Use this information to improve the product and the service.
- Review your metrics. For example, length of time to respond to an average call, type and frequency of complaint, complexity of complaint, product complaints, provider complaints, etc. Your metrics will help determine patterns and issues. Some problems may require systemic changes that are beyond the scope of what customer support staff or managers are able to do. These changes will require senior level staff intervention.
- Have a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page. Your metrics and customer feedback will help you identify what information should be in the FAQ’s
There is nothing more refreshing than dealing with a knowledgeable customer service agent who knows company policies, the product and can solve the problem. They represent the core beliefs and values of the company and will help retain customers.
A Few Last Words…
Good customer service is a relationship that involves two parties. Both parties must be willing to listen and work towards a satisfactory resolution.
Leadership Mindset 