Customer Service, Anyone?

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.