I listened today to an NPR show about customer service featuring Yale and UCONN professors. It was interesting and they quoted a lot of research about how good customer service wins business. It seemed like they were discovering America Then someone from Netflix came on and after he finished getting in a free commercial for his busines, which the moderator laughed, (as in good for you)... he extolled the virtue of replacing online customer service FAQ's with real live people.
Wake up. A little over 20 years ago in my study of marketing there was a golden rule of thumb: for every customer you pissed off you lost at least ten customers because that person would be so annoyed he would tell at least ten of his friends the sad story of how badly they were treated by the terrible company. And if someon had a good experience with customer service that person would only tell three of their friends because most people are not interested in nice stories. The moral of this lesson - you have to work THREE TIMES AS HARD to recover from one bad customer service experience.
Of course people want to deal with people or at the very least with a menu that is intuative, that a four year old could use and which allows you to call an agent whenever you need one.
Like United Airlines. Every time I phone them I just say AGENT into the mouthpiece of my phone and the electronic voice goes away and a real person comes on.
So I stick with United. Just a short story.
When last i used FEDEX to ship an expensive item from California to my home in the NE I insured it for $1000. Only a small part of the shipment arrived and FEDEX refused to pay because they said the item wasn't packaged properly. How they could declare that when it was given over to one of their people on the shipping end who accepted it - I can't understand. WHen it arrived I immediately knew that parts were missing and phoned the nearest depot only to be shunted to a Texas warehouse on the phone which could not do anything about looking for the missing part. After six months they paid us about half of the insurance money.
I have told my horror story to many more than ten friends. I have told you and I hope you will tell others that way the power of good vs. bad customer service may gain some ground.
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