A Tactic For Receiving Normal Customer Service in Israel

Customer service in Israel is often problematic. This is a well-known fact that I have written about before.

Fortunately — like many things in Israel — this is also fast-changing. There are thankfully plenty of exemplary companies here that really do put effort into taking care of their customers.

One day — time permitting — I would love to see established a sort of customer service gold circle to independently audit companies that do take this seriously. Sort of like a locally audited ISO-esque standard. As I have no background in customer service I am not suggesting that I set this up. Simply that it would be a good idea and that somebody should.

Some of the worst customer service in Israel, in my experience, comes from the local franchisees of international companies. I am not naming names. But think about household names that have a presence in Israel and which — to the undiscerning eye — appear to be the same familiar face.

In reality, the “presence” in Israel is often that they have a local franchisee operating under some sort of agreement. Part of the reason why customer service in Israel is sometimes so bad and abusive is that Israel is a small and captive market.

Companies treat customers poorly because they know that they can get away with it and that they don’t have better options. Thankfully, international shipping is disrupting this. But there are still things that need to be bought locally.

Yesterday, I spent about 500 NIS buying a piece of technology equipment for my business. It was a purchase which I require relatively soon and which I expected to receive soon given that I paid for DHL international shipping.

Unfortunately, it turned out to be a classic franchisee purchase situation. The company, nonchalantly, told me that they were unsure when my purchase might arrive. It would be “after” some unknowable international dispatch date. They would not answer their customer service email nor their phone. In my book, this isn’t acceptable customer service — and so it was time to wheel out my trick.

Email Head Office

Why emailing head office, or EMEA management, is, in my experience, so devastatingly effective really has to do with the fact that there is a rare confluence of interests at work here:

• You, the consumers, want to receive reasonable customer service
• The parent company wants their local franchisee to uphold customer standards and provide a consistent buyer experience. Sometimes, this is even baked into SLAs which the franchisee has committed to uphold (but oversight is often tricky due to the language difference)
• The local franchisee desperately wants to maintain their monopoly on importing/reselling the parent company.

Thus once the consumer has mustered up the courage to call out the elephant in the room things move fairly quickly.

I dashed off the following this morning which very quickly drew a response (yes, an answer!) from the previously unreachable Israeli franchisee. I have edited it slightly because it included an unnecessary jab at Israeli franchisees:

Dear X,

I placed this order yesterday from your Israeli distributor / representative.

They apparently do not believe in answering the listed telephone number — or responding to emails, or providing customer service in general.

Would it be possible to obtain information re: the expected delivery date from somebody not based in the country I live in / in the USA? If this item is being sourced centrally I would rather deal with you directly

As to ‘how,’ as a veteran online sleuth of sorts I can usually nail down a few very prescient points of contact without much difficulty. The usual toolkit involves the company’s website, LinkedIn (for organization mapping), and Hunter.io (for working out the company’s internal email structure). The key is to make sure that the complaint doesn’t look directly back to Israel through some sort of automated CRM routing. I have had this happen. Therefore this sometimes requires both contacting the EMEA manager and a specific personal email address.

Whether or not to CC the local franchisee on this dramatic move is a tactical decision that needs to be undertaken on a case by case basis.

I actually think it’s more fair to let the local representative know that after they have failed to resolve your issue or provide customer service you have been forced to go above their head.

I don’t like doing this. I don’t relish the prospect of letting companies know that their franchisees are doing an egregiously poor job. And yet, equally, I feel like it is unacceptable for a company to take my money and then ignore me — or refuse to provide any information as to when I can expect to receive the product I have ordered.

So in conclusion:

I don’t recommend that people do this after every bad customer service experience. But there is a time and place where I believe that it is warranted.

TL;DR — If you’re getting abysmal customer service from an international “company” based in Israel, then realize that it is probably a franchisee and not the direct employees of the company with whom you are dealing.

If efforts to resolve your issue locally run into a repeated brick wall, consider looping in the EMEA management or head office layer of the organization. Often, mountains that seemed immovable will suddenly leap to life.

Originally published at https://www.danielrosehill.co.il