Customer Service (RIP)
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Let's have a minute's silence to mourn the death of customer service in corporate America. :rose: I put the blame on company presidents and CEOs who give nothing more than lip service to customer service. Customer service managers appear to reward service reps for the number of calls handled, rather than the quality of service rendered. There is almost always never any validation of the quality of service received by the customer. Front-line employees who field service calls seem to be immature, uneducated, impolite, quick to defend themselves, lack accountability, and aren't motivated to render assistance. As an owner of a small business, I take my customers' satisfaction very seriously. I treat my customers with courtesy and respect, and almost always exceed their expectations. Maybe that's why I get unsolicited email from them saying how pleased they are with my products and service. Shame on you, AT&T, Cingular and most of corporate America. X| /ravi Let's put "civil" back in "civilization" http://www.ravib.com ravib@ravib.com
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Let's have a minute's silence to mourn the death of customer service in corporate America. :rose: I put the blame on company presidents and CEOs who give nothing more than lip service to customer service. Customer service managers appear to reward service reps for the number of calls handled, rather than the quality of service rendered. There is almost always never any validation of the quality of service received by the customer. Front-line employees who field service calls seem to be immature, uneducated, impolite, quick to defend themselves, lack accountability, and aren't motivated to render assistance. As an owner of a small business, I take my customers' satisfaction very seriously. I treat my customers with courtesy and respect, and almost always exceed their expectations. Maybe that's why I get unsolicited email from them saying how pleased they are with my products and service. Shame on you, AT&T, Cingular and most of corporate America. X| /ravi Let's put "civil" back in "civilization" http://www.ravib.com ravib@ravib.com
Ravi Bhavnani wrote: As an owner of a small business So one day when you are a multi-national corporate with thousands of employees and millions of customers... how are you going to scale yourself and your personal customer service? Lets face it. Most customer service departments are filled with people whose previous job was "Flippin burgers at McDees while studying social science and keg emptying." They are paid peanuts, are not trained, are given crash courses in the product they are supporting etc. etc. etc. As you said, the companies pay lip service to the creation and running of a customer service department. In this day and age though of cost cutting and all that I wonder who is going to spend more money on customer service. Nobody IMO. Outsourcing it is costly and more often than not a failure.. especially when you phone up Nokia about your new phone and get Sanjeeb El Akbar who is actually sitting in India at 1am and earns enough money to afford a 1m2 apartment in downtown Calcutta (no offence to Indians meant.) The values of small business get thrown out the window when they scale up to big business.
Paul Watson
Bluegrass
Cape Town, South AfricaChristopher Duncan wrote: Which explains why when Santa asked, "And what do you want for Christmas, little boy?" I said, "A life." (Accesories sold separately)
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Let's have a minute's silence to mourn the death of customer service in corporate America. :rose: I put the blame on company presidents and CEOs who give nothing more than lip service to customer service. Customer service managers appear to reward service reps for the number of calls handled, rather than the quality of service rendered. There is almost always never any validation of the quality of service received by the customer. Front-line employees who field service calls seem to be immature, uneducated, impolite, quick to defend themselves, lack accountability, and aren't motivated to render assistance. As an owner of a small business, I take my customers' satisfaction very seriously. I treat my customers with courtesy and respect, and almost always exceed their expectations. Maybe that's why I get unsolicited email from them saying how pleased they are with my products and service. Shame on you, AT&T, Cingular and most of corporate America. X| /ravi Let's put "civil" back in "civilization" http://www.ravib.com ravib@ravib.com
Ravi Bhavnani wrote: treat my customers with courtesy and respect Good for you! Pete
Insert Sig. Here!
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Ravi Bhavnani wrote: As an owner of a small business So one day when you are a multi-national corporate with thousands of employees and millions of customers... how are you going to scale yourself and your personal customer service? Lets face it. Most customer service departments are filled with people whose previous job was "Flippin burgers at McDees while studying social science and keg emptying." They are paid peanuts, are not trained, are given crash courses in the product they are supporting etc. etc. etc. As you said, the companies pay lip service to the creation and running of a customer service department. In this day and age though of cost cutting and all that I wonder who is going to spend more money on customer service. Nobody IMO. Outsourcing it is costly and more often than not a failure.. especially when you phone up Nokia about your new phone and get Sanjeeb El Akbar who is actually sitting in India at 1am and earns enough money to afford a 1m2 apartment in downtown Calcutta (no offence to Indians meant.) The values of small business get thrown out the window when they scale up to big business.
Paul Watson
Bluegrass
Cape Town, South AfricaChristopher Duncan wrote: Which explains why when Santa asked, "And what do you want for Christmas, little boy?" I said, "A life." (Accesories sold separately)
Paul Watson wrote: As you said, the companies pay lip service to the creation and running of a customer service department. In this day and age though of cost cutting and all that I wonder who is going to spend more money on customer service. Nobody IMO. Do you really have to spend more money for a better customer service department? It may just be about how well you organise it. A good question would be if people are willing to wait longer to get good technical support. Paul Watson wrote: The values of small business get thrown out the window when they scale up to big business. I see no reason why this should be the case. Kevin
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Paul Watson wrote: As you said, the companies pay lip service to the creation and running of a customer service department. In this day and age though of cost cutting and all that I wonder who is going to spend more money on customer service. Nobody IMO. Do you really have to spend more money for a better customer service department? It may just be about how well you organise it. A good question would be if people are willing to wait longer to get good technical support. Paul Watson wrote: The values of small business get thrown out the window when they scale up to big business. I see no reason why this should be the case. Kevin
Kevin Glover wrote: It may just be about how well you organise it You cannot simply re-organise a bunch of burger flippin cheap labourers into an efficient, skilled and talented support center. Sorry, but it takes money to do that. You need to train them in both customer care and the products they are supporting. You need to ensure their equipment is up to the job (ever sat on the other end of the line while a burger flipper...I mean Customer Care Representative...clicks away through fifty screens trying to find your details and the KB article which will help you) and that the environment is condusive to helping people. Also you need, wait for it, a manager to ensure the center carries on functioning as intended. Managers don't come cheap. Kevin Glover wrote: I see no reason why this should be the case. :) Name a current big business which you can phone up and talk to the CEO about a problem you are having with their Elwizzo 2000 product. I can name plenty of small business in which that is possible, but no big businesses. And to be perfectly honest if I was CEO of Wodgets & Widgets the last thing on my List Of Desires would be Direct Customer Access To Me. Yachting, enjoying the Sey Chelles or Golfing would be on that list.
Paul Watson
Bluegrass
Cape Town, South AfricaChristopher Duncan wrote: Which explains why when Santa asked, "And what do you want for Christmas, little boy?" I said, "A life." (Accesories sold separately)
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Kevin Glover wrote: It may just be about how well you organise it You cannot simply re-organise a bunch of burger flippin cheap labourers into an efficient, skilled and talented support center. Sorry, but it takes money to do that. You need to train them in both customer care and the products they are supporting. You need to ensure their equipment is up to the job (ever sat on the other end of the line while a burger flipper...I mean Customer Care Representative...clicks away through fifty screens trying to find your details and the KB article which will help you) and that the environment is condusive to helping people. Also you need, wait for it, a manager to ensure the center carries on functioning as intended. Managers don't come cheap. Kevin Glover wrote: I see no reason why this should be the case. :) Name a current big business which you can phone up and talk to the CEO about a problem you are having with their Elwizzo 2000 product. I can name plenty of small business in which that is possible, but no big businesses. And to be perfectly honest if I was CEO of Wodgets & Widgets the last thing on my List Of Desires would be Direct Customer Access To Me. Yachting, enjoying the Sey Chelles or Golfing would be on that list.
Paul Watson
Bluegrass
Cape Town, South AfricaChristopher Duncan wrote: Which explains why when Santa asked, "And what do you want for Christmas, little boy?" I said, "A life." (Accesories sold separately)
Paul Watson wrote: You cannot simply re-organise a bunch of burger flippin cheap labourers into an efficient, skilled and talented support center. Sorry, but it takes money to do that. You need to train them in both customer care and the products they are supporting. I agree, but why not employ fewer but more skilled people. That would work if people were willing to wait a little longer on hold in order to actually get decent support. One of the problems about phoning for technical support is that its difficult to do anything else while you're stuck on hold. You could implement a phone back system so people can go and do something else. That would let you get away with longer waiting times without people getting upset. Paul Watson wrote: Name a current big business which you can phone up and talk to the CEO about a problem you are having with their Elwizzo 2000 product. I can't think of any reason why I'd want to speak to a CEO of a company. I'd want to speak to someone who can help me with my problem. I doubt the CEO of most big companies could actually do that. Kevin
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Let's have a minute's silence to mourn the death of customer service in corporate America. :rose: I put the blame on company presidents and CEOs who give nothing more than lip service to customer service. Customer service managers appear to reward service reps for the number of calls handled, rather than the quality of service rendered. There is almost always never any validation of the quality of service received by the customer. Front-line employees who field service calls seem to be immature, uneducated, impolite, quick to defend themselves, lack accountability, and aren't motivated to render assistance. As an owner of a small business, I take my customers' satisfaction very seriously. I treat my customers with courtesy and respect, and almost always exceed their expectations. Maybe that's why I get unsolicited email from them saying how pleased they are with my products and service. Shame on you, AT&T, Cingular and most of corporate America. X| /ravi Let's put "civil" back in "civilization" http://www.ravib.com ravib@ravib.com
I agree with your sentiments about customer service. The lack of considerate and competent CSRs rests solely on the managers and executives of the corporations. A long time ago I got my first start in the IT industry by working at a technical support dept. Needless to say, most of the support people there were very rude and impolite. I was appalled that managment would let things like quickly hanging up on a customer to decrease the avg. call time stats was readily accepted. I suppose a lot of these problems were the result of a bad criteria for measuring performance when evaluation reviews came along. The priorities for the dept. was to get as many calls through as possible without them hanging up aftering being on hold, being on hold for more than 10 min., and keeping the avg. call time as low as possible. Everything else, like customer satisfaction and problem resolution was secondary to these other statistics. I think the problem to this solution is the mechanism by which employees are hired. I was reading a book about how Amazon.com got started, and Jeff Bozos (founder and CEO) as well as almost everyone else in the company (~20 ppl then) used to sit in on the interview of the customer service rep (CSR). Everyone in the company gave feedback on the candidate. They were intent on creating an eclectic group of CSRs from different fields who read widely. As a result, most of them could easily locate a specific book when the customer calling in just gave them a phrase or main plot of the novel and didn't know the title and/or author. So if companies would just expend a little bit more energy in first the hiring process to weed out the bad ones, then other things like giving good customer service, etc. will follow along.
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Ravi Bhavnani wrote: As an owner of a small business So one day when you are a multi-national corporate with thousands of employees and millions of customers... how are you going to scale yourself and your personal customer service? Lets face it. Most customer service departments are filled with people whose previous job was "Flippin burgers at McDees while studying social science and keg emptying." They are paid peanuts, are not trained, are given crash courses in the product they are supporting etc. etc. etc. As you said, the companies pay lip service to the creation and running of a customer service department. In this day and age though of cost cutting and all that I wonder who is going to spend more money on customer service. Nobody IMO. Outsourcing it is costly and more often than not a failure.. especially when you phone up Nokia about your new phone and get Sanjeeb El Akbar who is actually sitting in India at 1am and earns enough money to afford a 1m2 apartment in downtown Calcutta (no offence to Indians meant.) The values of small business get thrown out the window when they scale up to big business.
Paul Watson
Bluegrass
Cape Town, South AfricaChristopher Duncan wrote: Which explains why when Santa asked, "And what do you want for Christmas, little boy?" I said, "A life." (Accesories sold separately)
Paul Watson wrote: I wonder who is going to spend more money on customer service. Only the ones who want to remain in business. I get a laugh whenever I talk with the managers at my former employer. There's a Home Depot coming to town and they're scared spitless. Hardware is a fairly generic product - the only significant difference between vendors is the level of customer service offerred. Home Depot is well known for low prices and poor customer service, while this company is noted for slightly higher pricing and excellent customer service. Ironically, the owners' plan for surviving the new competition is to cut staff! The managers who are expected to make the business survive while the owners tie their hands are not happy campers. I'm just glad that company stock was not part of my severance package!:-D "My child was Inmate of the Month at Mohave County Jail" - Bumper Sticker in Bullhead City, AZ
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Paul Watson wrote: I wonder who is going to spend more money on customer service. Only the ones who want to remain in business. I get a laugh whenever I talk with the managers at my former employer. There's a Home Depot coming to town and they're scared spitless. Hardware is a fairly generic product - the only significant difference between vendors is the level of customer service offerred. Home Depot is well known for low prices and poor customer service, while this company is noted for slightly higher pricing and excellent customer service. Ironically, the owners' plan for surviving the new competition is to cut staff! The managers who are expected to make the business survive while the owners tie their hands are not happy campers. I'm just glad that company stock was not part of my severance package!:-D "My child was Inmate of the Month at Mohave County Jail" - Bumper Sticker in Bullhead City, AZ
Roger Wright wrote: Only the ones who want to remain in business. Thank you. :rose: And to others who submitted earlier replies faulting low-paid customer service reps with names that some westerners may find hard to pronounce: the problem starts at the top. Imho, management needs to view customer service as important as quality. Instead, they seem to pay more heed to Wall Street's opinions. And therein lies the flaw in their reasoning. /ravi Let's put "civil" back in "civilization" http://www.ravib.com ravib@ravib.com
