Where Oh Where Has Customer Service Gone!
Since 1980 I have been in either retail, 7 years, and/or consumer goods, with Frito-Lay, Dr Pepper Snapple Group, Dean Foods or other smaller consumer goods companies. At one point we thought it was a novel concept to return a customer call within 24 hrs. Now we just pray and hope that they are returned period. What do you think is the issue: under paid people not caring or wanting to do their job, managers not training their people to do the job, or a combination of both.
I cant tell you how many times my bank has made an error, or you call to get something corrected by a credit card company and follow up and no one has a record that you ever called two weeks prior. People think i do a great job service wise for them because i return an email within or less than one business day. If there is communication of two emails or more my policy is "there is a misunderstanding" so i pick up the phone to clarify the situation and they are shocked. If I have bad product and a consumer complaint i call the customer directly and apologize and let them know that we pride ourselves on quality and it will not happen again.
Is this all it takes today to be a super star "just respond" to requests, return emails and voice mails? What happen to the days when a real person answered the phone instead of press 1 for English and things were rectified right there and then. Instead today there is a language barrier from someone overseas and all promises end with nothing accomplished.
Oh i get it, it is all about cost cutting, "taking costs out of the system" what happens when you lose customers due to poor customer service. One retailer that i have found that gets it is Nebraska Furniture or Delta Airlines. I once wrote AA and told them they should fly Delta to see how customer service should be done correctly for an airline.
Anyway......am i the only one that feels like this. I welcome your opinion.
Retired Human Resources Professional
6 年Agree! I won’t name them, but there are two major home improvement and hardware retail competitors across the street from one another. This makes it easy to compare the two in customer service. One always has someone to greet you at the door and ask if you need help in locating whatever it is you came in to purchase; the Other can be about empty of customers (so it’s obvious they’re not so busy they aren’t available), and you wait and wait until you finally hunt staff down to have a key made then told, they have to find someone else to make the key and you wait and wait again. This really happened and I wrote an email to the corporate headquarters of both of these major home improvement retailers, complimenting the one with high regard for their excellent customer service and suggesting to the other that they visit their competitor across the street to learn and teach their staff what customer service is all about. I vowed to myself I would not go back to the one with poor customer service, unfortunately I do go there from time-to-time and every time I do, it is obvious they still don’t get it. I believe in complimenting those exceptional customer service acts and pray that I don’t lose it when I don’t get treated acceptable.