Is Customer Care becoming Rare ...

This morning, I tried reaching out to the customer service of a vendor. They had given a chennai landline number and when I called, there was an IVR Message which asked me to press 1 for Chennai, 2 for xx and so on.

I was perplexed because I had dialled a chennai-specific number and here I was asked to press 1 for Chennai. This meant that there was one number available nationally that customers could reach out to but I did not understand the logic of asking a customer in say Bengaluru to call a Chennai landline number and then select their city.

Or if I had reached a national number, then their system should have been intuitive enough to recognize that my number is that of a customer in Chennai and skipped the first step of asking me to select the city.

There is an even more crazier IVR system from another business that requires me to enter my 10 digit customer number every time I call their customer care!! And then they have the gall to ask me for my registered mobile number for security purposes!! Perhaps they have devised this mechanism to deter their customers from calling Customer Care and use those statistics to show how robust their service is!!

There is enough and more research available to indicate that longer you keep a customer waiting on the system, the higher the chances of that customer dropping out!!

I recall writing a post on the same subject with a different example earlier more than a year and half back (Feb 8, 2017) and it appears that businesses continue to treat their customers without any consideration for their time or effort.

Well, how about your own customer-facing systems, manual or electronic? Have you tried them yourself as a customer before launching it?

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The Author is the Principal Consultant with Idea To IPO Growth Consultants