“Your call is important to us”
The infuriating lies that turn us off from customer service
What goes through your head when an automated message says “Your call is important to us”
My reaction is to turn on the speakerphone and brace myself for 2 hours of elevator music.
Because we all know that nine out of ten times, the company doesn’t actually care about us.
This is not a knock on customer service representatives. Not at all.
In fact, I wholeheartedly believe that every single person should work customer service at some point in their lives. As a whole, we are so incredibly rude to our servers, our retail workers, our customer service representatives. We ought to see how the other shoe fits.
Rather, this is a knock on companies that put product first and customer service as a far last priority.
We live in a world where so many of our customer service interactions begin with an over-saturation of lies and deceit. Customer service is rarely adequately staffed, trained or focused upon.
Think about it. Most of the time, when we finally get in contact with a real person, we are already so frustrated by the company’s obvious disinterest for our time and concerns. Thus, no matter how good the representative is, our entire experience is tainted.
While we may interact with a singular representative, the reality is that good (and bad) customer service is top down.
Your request is important to us and we will respond as soon as possible
This was repeated in all twelve of the automated emails I received from EB games in the past few months.
If my request was important to you, would I really have to send 12 emails for an actual person to reply? If you really are responding as soon as possible… well you must have a lot of requests.
All I wanted to do is get a refund for the game I returned. If I had known it would require so much effort, I might’ve just let them keep those 60 bucks. (I mean it’s not like they’ve refunded me yet anyways.)
Because it’s pretty damn obvious that my request does not matter.
“Please hold, we will be with you momentarily”
I’m pretty sure that the official definition of the word moment is a very brief period of time. I’m not sure about you, but in my world of phone calls — in fact in most parts of my world — two hours is NOT brief.
Sometimes it’s busy, sometimes you’re understaffed. I get it. But please consider the common courtesy of telling us long we can expect to be waiting.
Instead of interrupting our elevator music with “Please hold, all our agents are currently busy. We will be with you momentarily,” every three minutes, just tell us the queue is an hour long, so we aren’t (im)patiently waiting.
“Your satisfaction is our top priority”
No, it’s not. It absolutely is not.
Your top priority is to keep me as a customer. Your top priority is to ensure I need your product more than I hate your customer service.
Let’s not lie here. It’s not about me being satisfied. It’s about me being satisfied enough.
Yes. My call is boring. It doesn’t even make you money. No zeros are added to your checkbooks and there isn’t a direct dollar measure.
But you only have to look at that entertainment capital with mouse ears or the shoe company that starts with a “Z” and ends with “appos” to see the value of customer service.
There are dozens of film studios, amusement parks, and storybooks. There are hundreds of high-calibre sports shoe companies. In fact, children’s entertainment and sports apparel are some of the most competitive markets. Yet, Disney and Zappos came up on top because of nothing more than stellar customer service.
And not just customer service, but customer service from top-down. Their entire company models are based upon training every employee to believe that customer satisfaction is always paramount. Suddenly, we actually feel cared about.
Because instead of telling us that our call is important or that our satisfaction is the top priority, they act like it.
But maybe that isn’t your business model. Maybe you’re not in the business of putting the time and money into anything that isn’t directly associated to a dollar value profit.
Just please don’t tell me that my call is important to you.
We both know you don’t give two shits about it.
