Is Bad Customer Support Killing Your Business?
It’s time to defeat the old bad customer support drum again. I understand, I’m fed up with defeating the drum, too, but as long as bad customer service operates rampant through so many businesses Personally i think it is my entrepreneurial responsibility to bring it to your attention. So get a pew and prepare to hear the sermon I’ve preached before: bad customer service is the bane of business. If the Almighty smote down every business that dispenses bad customer service the world would be a much friendlier, albeit much sparser place.
What puzzles me most is if bad customer service is such a loss of life knell for business, why do so many businesses let it go on? Don’t they read my column, for Pete’s sake? I think the problem is that most bad customer support is doled out (or at least condoned) by business owners and managers who’ve ceased nurturing what their customers think.
When you stop nurturing what your customers think it is time to close the doors. Go find a day job. You’ll make someone a wonderfully disgruntled employee. My latest parable of lousy customer service was actually experienced by my spouse while wanting to buy my child a set of basketball shoes.
- Respond to change
- Baltimore City, Md.,
- BCs to do assortment of small value deposits
- Average Hours Worked• Insert Exhibit 5.3 5 – 13
I won’t point out the name of the shoe chain store where the bad customer service took place, but I am going to tell you that its name is comparable to the sound a frog with hiccups might make. When my partner pointed out this known fact, one of the employees, a cheeky lass of 16 or so, put her hands on her hips and said, “How rude!” The males in the group didn’t react in any way.
They were too occupied arguing over who could take a break so they could chase other cheeky lasses about the shopping mall. Obviously my lovely bride-to-be, who has the capacity to instill fear in to the hearts of even the most worthless employees, remaining the gaggle of giggling teen idiots standing using their mouths open in disbelief.
How dare a person tell them to achieve that with a pair of basketball shoes? As much as I bemoan bad customer support I commemorate good customer support. It should be applauded and the purveyor of said good customer service should be compensated for actually delivering satisfaction to the customer far beyond the call of responsibility.
So let me tell you the storyplot of my new hero, Ken. I won’t tell you the name of the store where Ken works, but let’s just say they began offering radios in a shack somewhere long, ago long. I first met Ken when i went into the store to buy a mixing board for my business that records audio products for the web.
In a nutshell, you plug microphones in to the mixing board then connect it to the computer and you could record audio directly to digital format. Totally beside the point of this article, but I didn’t want you convinced that I was purchasing non-manly food preparation utensils. When i got the mixer installed it didn’t work. So I boxed it and going back to the store to return it up. While i told Ken my problem he didn’t just grunt and present me my money back as so many bad customer service reps would do. I couldn’t obtain it to work, neither could Ken.