Customer-Focused Emails? Not So Much

I am not an email marketing guru, go talk to my friend Hillel Berg if you need help with that kind of thing.

But what I do know is customer service. Make the customer feel like you are family and understand and want to help them.

And they, in turn, want to help you.

I have been dealing with a refund dispute for canceled airline flights for the last 4 months with my UK bank.

After dragging on with the airline, they finally tracked down that they indeed did pay the refunds (we had 3 tickets, and one has yet to be refunded) and provided a transaction code that the bank could verify.

Thus I started the dispute process with my bank. It is still ongoing because no one at the bank can read English anymore, given that they have tried to close this twice, citing incorrect information and not even mentioning the transaction if it was received.

But this is not about their illiteracy.

It is about their lack of customer care.

When dealing with disputed transactions, the last thing any customer wants to see is an email from a “do not reply” address or a bounce back after replying that there is no such mailbox.

What possible reason could you have to do this? What genius of a CMO thought this was the best way to handle it? I know the CMO probably had zero to do with it, but all the more reason is that they should define how all customer interactions should be handled.

Any customer goodwill that may have existed really takes a hit in these circumstances.

Below is how my latest email ended, similar to all the others:

Thank you again for contacting me and please let me know if I can be of any further help. 
Yours sincerely
M. A. 
Complaints Team
Learn about our complaint handling process here: bank.com/howtocomplain (yes that is the actual URL without their name)        

Please do not email a response to this message. Emails are not monitored.        

This last line is what really bothers me.

A formal email with a 2-page PDF explaining why they are incompetent and what they will do to fix their internal systems was sent, but there was no way to reply to it.

I have to grab the email, case #, and other info from it and copy and paste it all into a new email instead of keeping a mail flow that would provide a more straightforward resolution.

Don’t do this to customers. Ever.

While this probably is a left hand meet right hand issue, nonetheless I am sure zero thought went into this process about the customer.

I want to say this is unsual in an era of “put the customer first” but it is not.

Phone companies, electric companies, banks, and other businesses still do this because, in their opinion, people require too much effort to handle the countless emails.

I agree, but there are solutions.

·?????? Hire more people.

·?????? Leverage AI for your mailboxes and route emails accordingly.

·?????? Reverse engineer your workflows and applications so the customer can plug themselves into the process directly. If I could look up the transaction code, I would, but I can’t. Why? Privacy laws, right? But it is my account, and my name is on the receipt, so, why can’t I look up the transaction?

·?????? Leverage chatbots that can do something other than point us to FAQ content.

Just stop saying you are customer-focused when you aren’t. One of these days, you may end up on customerrant.com.

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