Yearning for customer service

Almost three quarters of respondents told interviewers that they’d rather have good service than gifts as signs of appreciation for their loyalty, and 84 per cent said that it only takes one experience to lock them in or lose them. Disturbingly, only 62 per cent of respondents said they had received great customer service in the past month.

Other reports say that customer service in the IT world specifically is, to be blunt, going straight down the toilet as efforts to support too many devices with too few resources fall flat.

Even companies with reputations for first-rate support are failing, as I discovered not too long ago.

It seemed like a simple thing. My Internet connection dropped, and when I checked the wireless router, it was dead, and a sniff test revealed that the power adapter had failed. I e-mailed the vendor, who had a sterling record in the support arena, and my first hint that things were not as good as they had been in the past came in the form of an e-mail, a couple of days later, asking me to phone technical support.

Right. Dead router and burning smell was not enough of a clue that the device was no longer of this world. I phoned, sat on hold for an hour (hint 2), heard the call ring through to a technician – and the line went dead. Another callback and prolonged wait on hold got me a polite young man who was obviously following a script and didn’t have the wit to deviate from it.

The router is dead, I told him. There is a burning smell.

Plug it into a PC, he told me.

What part of “dead” did he not understand?

As he dutifully marched through his troubleshooting script, with no regard for customer feedback, the router wasn’t the only thing singed around the edges. My temper was overheating too.

Finally he decided that I should talk to a second level person. More hold time. Another polite young man who went through his script (which in many ways duplicated that of the level one tech). This tech finally figured out that the router was, indeed, deceased. He gave me a reference number and told me I’d be contacted within 24 hours about replacement.

One week later, the only thing I’d received was an e-mailed link to a customer satisfaction questionnaire. I filled it out, like 60 per cent of survey respondents reporting my dissatisfaction with the experience.

I haven’t heard a peep from the vendor. I guess nobody reads those responses, either.

I’m using another brand of router now. It’s not a market leader like the previous unit, so the vendor is still trying to impress customers, and it shows.

Does success lead to complacency? Or does it simply lead to overstretching of resources that gives the same result? If the surveys are to be believed, that can have a huge cost, both in customer satisfaction, and in customer retention. There are very few second chances these days.

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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Lynn Greiner
Lynn Greiner
Lynn Greiner has been interpreting tech for businesses for over 20 years and has worked in the industry as well as writing about it, giving her a unique perspective into the issues companies face. She has both IT credentials and a business degree

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