Customer Service

[Deviate]

I thought I'd make my first thread something lighthearted. Discussion stuff after the quotes. Preface: I'm a tech-support/customer service manager. These are all real emails I've received.

U P S Came on Friday, but the driver did not leave my books!!! I Dont live in the apt! I am in the R.V.in the drive way!!!! The Lady in the other apt. , told that to the driver but she did not listen. Please have My Books Deliverd to me at <address>. Driveway of apt A. Thank You !! OR 2nd. Adress+ <another place>. # 11 Botrh Address Are <city, zip, etc> Thank You Again <name>

___________________

All right gentlemen or ladies,
I am going to try to not go ballistic. I am tired of this s---! Did someone verify that there is a program disc in the package??? My bet is NO. This university's fractured, piecemeal, spread out organization is disfunctional. It has cost me my grade for this quarter in both classes. I do not want another textbook. Hell, I don't even know the exact procedure for returning the s--- I just got that was missing the only thing I needed. I am tired of dealing with this level of incompetence!!!!!!! It has taken so much of my time and effort that I have had no time left for classwork. I am extremely unhappy. Keep your s---!!! I can't download it off of the internet, I have pirated copies that I don't know what to do with. I hate microsoft with a passion, so much so that I have considered ................................ Oh well. nuff said!
I need somebody to walk me through the process step by step. I get to a point and the UI available is confusing and non-informative. I don't know what to do next!!! There is no acceptable alternative to the s--- I see!! None of it describes what I want!! Total disfunctionality!!!!!! Bad IT!!! Do you think there is someone with a basic level of intelligence that can TALK to me, and tell me what I am doing wrong!!!!!!!!!! I do not understand why this has to be so hard. Isn't the purpose of these pieces of s--- to save time and effort???? I could have accomplished 100 times more with a manual typewriter and a pencil!!!!!! Now, somebody, who wants to really help, contact me! Otherwise, F--- O--!
I don't want to hear or be contacted by worthless mindless idiots. Sorry, this has been very hard on me.

_____________________

Yes, I understand that's how it's supposed to work, but it's not working.
As I said below, your website adds an exclamation mark to the end of my
email address. The one you have on file is correct, but when you add an
exclamation mark to it, it's not going to work.

I just clicked on the link & followed the instructions you provided below,
just in case it took me to a newer version of your website or something.
Same result. I type in my actual email address (the same one as you have on
file), and then the website says a new password has been sent to
<email address>!.

Any ideas?

____________________

Etc. (There's plenty more that could be shared...)

Have you ever contacted customer service? Were you happy with the experience? What happened? Do you think the customer is always right? Did you speak with a manager? Please feel free to add whatever is relevant to the conversation.

 

[Cutlass]

Customer service frequently sucks because that is the cheapest way to deal with the situations. People give up and go away, and so the firm doesn't have to pay someone to deal with them. You want good customer service, you have to deal with organizations that do not have customers that can easily go elsewhere and get the same thing.

 

[Deviate]

Our customers absolutely can go elsewhere. We compete with Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or any other company that sells textbooks. There's not a simple answer on why some customer service agents are "bad." (Bad managers, bad trainers, bad pay, etc, usually in that order)

Customer Service is also not "cheap." Our largest expense is payroll.

 

[Cutlass]

It is because your largest expense is payroll that customer service is bad. They cut out as much of it as they can get away with. As long as sales fall within their acceptable range, the way to maximize profits is to deliver the least service to the customers that they can get away with. It is only when sales fall out of the range that the management finds acceptable that improving service becomes a priority.

Also you have to have an idea of how much repeat customers you have. In many businesses, particularly on the net, you have people who shop a price or an availability and may never do business with the company again. So there's little incentive to build a relationship of repeat customers that care about the ongoing service.

Further, even though there are numerous, and serious, complaints, you have to consider the complaint to volume of customer ratio. If it's low enough, then losing a few to bad service isn't really harmful to the firm.

 

[Tecknojock]

Steams customer service is driving me nuts. I bought a game through them last month and it refuses to install. It installs on my laptop just fine, but there is no way it can handle the game. It won't install on my desktop for some reason. I've been back and forth with tech support several times and when I finally decided to give up and ask for a refund, they continue to provide troubleshooting instead of a refund and its going no where.

 

[Deviate]

@Cutlass

I don't agree with your conclusion. I don't follow how the goal of keeping costs down equals bad service. We are given a budget that we have to work with but that doesn't touch the way we handle our customers. It does affect how many people we can hire and raises. I also disagree with statements like, "we have so many customers we don't care about one bad experience." I do both the QA and training for my entire department. Those that continuously provide bad service do not last long. If you'd like I'd be happy to discuss our QA standards.

 

[Deviate]

when I finally decided to give up and ask for a refund, they continue to provide troubleshooting instead of a refund and its going no where.

Ask to be escalated to a supervisor imo

 

[Bamspeedy]

@Cutlass

I don't agree with your conclusion. I don't follow how the goal of keeping costs down equals bad service. We are given a budget that we have to work with but that doesn't touch the way we handle our customers. It does affect how many people we can hire and raises. I also disagree with statements like, "we have so many customers we don't care about one bad experience." I do both the QA and training for my entire department. Those that continuously provide bad service do not last long. If you'd like I'd be happy to discuss our QA standards.

Would the company hire 1000 people to reduce the wait time (being put on hold) on calls from 3 minutes to 2 minutes? Would the company give a customer who complains a free product regardless of how legitimate the complaint is?

Some things would result in improved service but are not cost effective and some customers are unreasonable so it would be better off to lose that one customer than to have to give thousands more customers substantially cheaper or free products (when others hear of that guy who got a free product just by calling customer service).

Workers being paid less results in higher turnover which means less trained staff to deal with the calls properly and fewer workers result in longer waits on the calls, all of which results in poorer customer service.

So many companies' service centers are automated to weed out those that have simple questions (FAQ), non-serious calls (joke calls), etc., but it also results in worse customer service because some get annoyed at listening to a few dozen options on the hotline before they can speak to a human.

 

[Deviate]

Do you really think that not giving out free stuff to every customer equals bad customer service? (We do give out free shipping very regularly among other things as issues arise.)

We staff based upon service levels. You are right that someone high up makes an arbitrary decision on what is holding too long or too many abandons. (10% for abandons in our case.) But do you really think that little extra wait means bad service?

I don't think "some customers are unreasonable so it would be better off to lose that one customer than to have to give thousands more customers substantially cheaper or free products" is an accurate statement. (Here at least.) I promise you we deal with plenty of unreasonable people and they do get what they want more often than not. You can't have excellent customer service with an attitude like that. You must treat every issue with respect. Regarding the pay and keeping staff, while I acknowledge it is an issue, I feel that's sort of analogous to asking a hospital why it doesn't pay every doctor a million dollars a year so that it hires only the best. It's just not viable. We do pay very well for the qualifications the job requires.

 

[BvBPL]

I don't follow how the goal of keeping costs down equals bad service. We are given a budget that we have to work with but that doesn't touch the way we handle our customers. It does affect how many people we can hire and raises.

How can that not affect customer service? If you're limited in how you can reward your employees the best ones will move on to companies that are more generous with their wages and you'll be left with employees who are too lazy to look for a better job.

Even more so, if you're staffing budget is limited you wouldn't be able to fire bad employees to replace with better ones because that will be too expensive. Instead you'll keep your bad employees around to warm the seats because that's cheaper than firing them and hiring new ones. The worst employees you can have are those that come in on time and complete their work to the letter but are bitter and don't hold back in the breakroom. The poor morale of those employees will poison the new workers you do bring in.

The best customer service experience I've had (on both sides, both working for and contacting as a customer) are those that integrate sales and customer service. This enables the reps to earn commission pay based on their sales and brings them into the value stream. Employees who recognize their value to the company (and are recognized for that value) will perform better work and be happier interacting with the customer (which the customer can hear over the phone lines).

 

[Leonel]

There's some customer service I like doing. I used to do temp work at WebMD and we'd be doing e-mail replies to people and during lulls in activity, we'd screw around. However I tried doing customer service for Sprint Nextel when they first merged and that was a nightmare. I only lasted one day on the floor.

 

[Bamspeedy]

Do you really think that not giving out free stuff to every customer equals bad customer service? (We do give out free shipping very regularly among other things as issues arise.)

To the guy that thinks he deserves the free stuff, if he doesn't get it he will say the customer service is bad. He could be unreasonable or not, if he gets what he wants then he'll say the customer service is great, if he doesn't get it he will say the service is terrible.

But do you really think that little extra wait means bad service?

I don't have a specific time limit, but odds are the longer I have to wait the more likely I will hang up, and if I hang up I will say the service was bad. I admit one minute most of the time won't make a difference, but sometimes it will, and unless I get told "your call will be answered in approxiamately ___ minutes" I won't know if I just need to wait 1 more minute or 10 minutes.

I don't think "some customers are unreasonable so it would be better off to lose that one customer than to have to give thousands more customers substantially cheaper or free products" is an accurate statement. (Here at least.) I promise you we deal with plenty of unreasonable people and they do get what they want more often than not. You can't have excellent customer service with an attitude like that. You must treat every issue with respect.

If they have a legitimate complaint, they should get a legitimate response. Giving away free stuff to any crackpot call will result in losing alot of money to fraudsters and will only work if it's a product that not many crackpots want (which I guess might be your case since you sell textbooks), or you give them something of lesser value (free shipping instead of free products)

 

[emzie]

You should really really edit out the name of your company in these posts.

edit: oh you didn't include it. Great job reading on my part

 

[Deviate]

You're not going to make every single person happy all of the time, infinite budget or not. We sometimes have people complain even after we have literally replaced the damaged textbook, refunded the original cost of the book and refunded shipping. Also, we have no issues firing/hiring. I have people with better degrees working for me. The job market is totally crap right now. At least around here.

@Bamspeedy - I'm drawing a distinction between a customer saying we have bad customer service and having bad customer service for a little bit of clarification. I don't think our customer service is meaningfully impacted by our current budget. Yes, I absolutely agree that if our budget was suddenly cut in half we'd be screwed.

Most call centers I know of have the following:

Call-back options - Leave your number and the next available agent will contact you or continue to wait.

ETA Timers - The next available agent will be available in approximately X minutes. There are X number of callers ahead of you.

I pulled the stats for yesterday. Our average time to answer was 1:32. Is that too long in your opinion? (Generally speaking obviously.)

Also, we do get quite a few fraud orders. We service international schools as well as national so we get a lot of trouble from certain African nations. (It happens domestically as well too.)

@leonel - I have never done face to face customer service. I can't imagine I'd enjoy that either.

 

[BvBPL]

I'm curious what your turn over rate is.

 

[Deviate]

I haven't looked recently but I believe it is around two years. I can't remember if that was for the company or our department though.

In the last year we've had 1 person get fired and 4 people quit. We hired 7 people and will be hiring 4 more in April. We have seasonal staff too but that doesn't count.

 

[downtown]

That kind of turnover rate would be pretty good for a call center. I've done recruiting work for call centers before and everybody I've worked with lost people at a higher clip.

Whether budgets necessarily lead to poor customer service depends totally on the specifics on the company, their employment market, and the corporate culture. Wage isn't always the primary motivation for leaving or slacking on the job. Depending on other circumstances, it may not even be in the top 3.

 

[IdiotsOpposite]

I heard from a friend of mine in the industry that one of the big reasons for high turnover is having to deal with customers...

 

[NetGear]

You have to be a real sadomasochist to be doing customer service. Or jedimaster with mind tricks. You're better off at sales if you got that skill though.

 

[shadowplay]

I've had some issues with so-called "customer service" departments, especially at major electronics chains. I've come to the conclusion these departments exist solely to frustrate and annoy you into giving up, and I don't waste any of my time with them unless it's for very basic stuff like returning items. If you have any real issue that needs deaing with, ask to speak to a manager right off the bat and don't waste one breath on the customer service people unless you enjoy getting the run around.