Frequently when people say “this provider is good for me”
I’ll ask, “Oh, have you had a problem with them?”
To which they’ll almost inevitably respond: “Nope, I’ve never had any problems with them.”
I feel this is kind of missing the point.
Usually, a good judge of a company, is how they respond when something goes wrong. Things go wrong for everyone, in every field. Sometimes there are procedures to reduce the impact of things going wrong, but things will not go to plan for everything – this is guaranteed.
And when something goes wrong, a customer ends up contacting the customer support department, or whatever it’s called.
I’m a long time Ebay user and I recently had an issue. Consider this recent conversation:
URL of item 1
URL of item 2
item: Item ID 1
item: Item ID 2
Your request could not be processed at this time
Sorry, we aren’t able to complete your request at this time.
If you encounter this message more than once, please contact us, and we’ll do our best to help.
So let’s look at some of the things that are wrong with this in detail.
Firstly, I refuse to believe that the person I’m talking to is actually called Carol Andrews. I believe it’s likely to be a cover name for a support operative who is located in an offshore location, and has been given an ostentatiously anglo-american name. Whilst there is nothing specifically wrong with this, it breaks down my trust of the organisation.
Secondly, they could replicated the problem, but they couldn’t help other than to suggest vague workarounds and to give me reassurances. Given that the same (almost identically worded) reassurances had been given two days earlier, I didn’t have much faith that there was actually an engineer working on it.
Thirdly, they try to infer the problem is at my end – “the wide variety of different computer and internet setups” – even though they had replicated the problem themselves.
Fourthly, on further inspection, it turns out they practically only had a script and are unable to communicate with anyone with clue, to reassure me further in anyway.
So let’s look at what has been accomplished:
The customer was told a workaround to the problem, but wasn’t reassured that the problem was being fixed or that the company treated it as a priority, or given any sense that they were worth anything at all.
This is customer service, it does actually help, but it’s not very good customer service – it’s customer service that’s “just” good enough to stop the majority of people leaving and just enough to put people off contacting customer service again.
With gritted teeth, I took their advice, explained the situation to the seller, paypal’d them the payment manually, marked the payment as sent. Suddenly, everything worked again.
My technical backseat diagnostics would suggest that there was a validation issue with the item and the data was inconsistent somehow and so the validation code was rudely throwing a wobbly. Had someone technical looked at this they’d have probably seen this straight away and have been able to fix it.
There are many ways the procedure could have gone better, but rather than imaging what they’d be like with good customer service, instead I’m going to blog at some point in future about people who “get” good customer service and do things “right”.