Last week we looked at the Customer Service Theatre that follows a hyper-vigilant Seal Team Six intervention on social media. This week, we should look at the much more pernicious problem of Customer Hide and Seek.
We all know this game because we all play this game. It goes something like this: I have a question/problem/complaint and I would like to share that with the company that sold me the product. So I’m going to visit the website. And I’m going to look for an email or a toll-free number.
If you are like most companies, you will fail to provide that information. So I will either go rooting around on your Investor Relations page to find a contact email, or I will head to social media and try to get Seal Team Six to respond.
On the other side of this quest is a conversation inside that company that goes something like this:
Marketing Person: We should put a toll-free number on our website so people can talk to us.
Customer Service Person: But then customers will call it looking for support.
Sales Person: We don’t want to talk to customers. We want to talk to prospects.
Human Resources Person: As long as job-seekers can’t find a phone number.
Sales Person: We don’t want to talk to job-seekers. We want to talk to prospects.
Operations Person: We could put a really complicated directory on the toll-free so inbound callers can press buttons and be redirected until they give up.
Customer Service Person: We don’t want to talk to customers. We want them to self-serve on our terrible website.
Social Media Person: But the customers who forget their login information keep messaging us when they can’t get into our terrible website.
Customer Service Person: They should just call in to have the user ID reset.
Marketing Person: We should put a toll-free number on the website.
Sales, Customer Service, Human Resources and Operations People (together): But we don’t want to talk to customers.
So let’s get this straight: we spend hours and hours in Customer Experience planning meetings. We chatter endlessly about Net Promoter Scores, personas, ARPU, share of wallet, competitive positioning, customer engagement, market share and being Enchanting. But we don’t want to speak to any customers?
Folks, bad news. They want to speak to us. They want to ask questions, they want to find out how to use our products, they want us to live up to the promises we made when we took their money, sometimes they want to complain and sometimes they want us to know how much they value our products. Occasionally, they want to work for us. None of these are bad things.
I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have a whiny customer who is willing to invest the time to tell me what’s wrong than a customer who silently takes their business elsewhere.
The problem is not that we don’t believe in customer service or great experiences or brand equity; the problem is that we don’t want to pay for it. Good customer service costs money, mostly because good customer service requires actual people talking to other actual people to listen to them and solve their problem. Phone calls cost about $7.00 each; email $6.50 and even live chat is $5.00 a pop. The last time I looked, the cost for a decent B2B lead in Canada was well over $20, and even more for an enterprise lead.
Now I’m all for self-service, which costs much less, and Gartner tells us that by 2020, 85% of people will interact with brands without ever talking to a human being . I’m not convinced this is a good thing. But as soon as we start eliminating people from the solution we start breeding Porcupines. If you’re too lazy to click the link, a Porcupine is a customer who is so frustrated and unhappy that they are pointy and mean and about to push your Average Handle Time numbers into the stratosphere.
Customer service is expensive. Paying people to answer phones, be nice, find answers and solve problems is expensive. I would argue that in a healthy company, the cost to let your customers talk to you has got to be less than the cost of forcing them to Seal Team Six and certainly cheaper than having them walk away or publicly shame you on the way out.
Yes, people will call the wrong numbers. Yes, they will do end-runs to sales, HR, media relations and finance. Yes, they will send long, rambling emails that don’t make sense. This is easy stuff to deal with. Sales Squirrels know how to talk to people and if you give them a talk track, they will know how to gently redirect them to customer service, the recruiting department or accounts payable.
Related Posts:
How Marketing is Pushing Customer Service Under the Bus
Porcupines Part II: How Can I Miss You When You Keep Going Away?
BizMarketer is Elizabeth Williams
You can reach me at escwilliams@gmail.com
or follow me on Twitter @bizmkter
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