Customer Service is often an
oxymoron (two words that mean the opposite). Lately I have seen some
improvement, and some that is just amazingly inexcusable. First the inexcusable:
A McDonalds that I sometimes frequent
for coffee has such a long track record of poor service that I use it as a case
study in how not to run a business. I
interview customers in line, and employees at this location to see how this
could happen. The employees, when asked the
question “when the last time you saw your store manager” they respond with things
like “I don’t know, I have worked here three months and I’ve never seen him”.
You get the picture, lack of interest by management and lack of management
support are usually the root cause of bad service. Although hiring the wrong people (or paying
too little), also a management function, is an additional culprit.
Trader Joes (my example of
great customer service) and Whole Foods (moving into Trader Joe’s customer
happiness territory) both are, I read, top paying in their industry. They get rewarded by good employee
involvement in customer satisfaction.
Today I called the visitor’s
bureau of a major city to get information about a tour I was going to conduct
on Monday and Tuesday. Not only did the
phone tell me to “just leave a voice message”, the next message was “voice mail
box full”. Does that not tell you the
last time they actually helped a visitor get real information?
Finally, today I called
customer service at a major company, Lee Jeans, to find out why a website order
I placed a few days ago stalled in the checkout process. I never could get it
to accept the order. What I found was a surprising amount of customer service:
1.
they answered the
phone after about 30 seconds on hold. A
really smart person who actually knew something about the systems.
2.
She was able to
find my order, hung up, 8 days ago, by just my last name. Impressive.
3. she discovered my
order lacked what they thought was a valid shipping address (but I don’t think
that was the real problem at all).
4.
She was able to
find my order, hung up, 8 days ago, by just my last name. Impressive.
5.
She completed the
order for me, and gave me free overnight shipping since the
company’s website had confused me == a nice customer service touch – like Whole
Foods who recently gave me a free banana since it was too small an item to
bother “ringing up”.
So, if you too, have good and
bad customer service examples, I would love to read them, please comment to
this Blog post. I will share them with
B-school professors I know. And with my classes next time I teach in the marketing
school.
