Trash your FAQs.
What is customer service to you?
Recently I have encountered customer service professionals who tell me things like, ‘I’m sorry, we can’t do that.’ ‘It’s not company policy.’ ‘There’s nothing I can do about it.’ When I hear such things I not only wonder what happened to customer service, I get genuinely angry.
It doesn't matter whether I have a referral or not, I pick a service provider out of several others because I feel they can deliver meaningful service to me.
Customer service is doing ALL you can to make sure your customers are satisfied with your product or service.
This means that customers with their uniqueness and differences will require a myriad of services in a myriad of ways. Peculiar situations will make customers demand peculiar things. The job of the representative is not to take a cursory look at the Company Policy and FAQs and determine that a customer’s peculiar problem is beyond her or the company’s range of expertise.
Tanya leases an apartment for six months in an upscale complex in downtown Houston with a deposit of $900. Four months into her lease she gets a job in South Africa and moves there a month before her lease expires, after signing the move out documents. Her brother who has been staying with her cleans up the apartment and makes sure everything is in original condition before dropping the keys at the complex office and writing his new apartment as the forwarding address.
Two weeks later Tanya calls to confirm when her deposit will be returned. The company representative assures her she will get a check in the mail within a week. Tanya then asks that the check be made out to her brother as she will not be able to either get the check or cash it.
The company rep says “I’m sorry; we can only make out the check in the name on the lease.”
“But I’m not in the country. I won’t be able to cash it. I can write an authorization, a letter with a copy my ID or something. Please work something out.” After several calls and emails Tanya is angrier than ever; the company won’t budge and I’m left with the question, what really is customer service?
Customers should not be treated like a thousand peas in a pod; they hardly ever want the same things.
Good businesses foresee peculiar situations and make room for such. Either that or they adapt and get creative when new problems arise. Policies are not set in stone and businesses should realize that.
Worst still, I have encountered two customer representatives of the same company telling me totally different things. One said “Of course we can do that” while the other said “It is definitely not company policy.”
Email me when Remi! publishes or recommends stories