Send Your Customer Service Staff Away For Customer Service Week

As I write this, Kenyan companies are celebrating Customer Service Week. I am not yet clued in on the activities of the week, but early this morning, an ISP with whom I constantly fight  because of poor service sent me a cheery text:

“Dear Customer. We salute you for your loyalty and valuable feedback. Happy CS Week 2018! Thank you for choosing {insert name here}. #SustainingCXExcellence”

I was a little offended that despite their calling me endlessly to remind me of by billing due date, their system did not know my name. I also wondered about the hashtag, because a phone text messaging does not allow me to do anything with this hashtag – I couldn’t click on it to see more. I also wondered if the hashtag went out to everyone, including those of an older generation who call it “pound sign” or its right name, “octothorpe”. Anyway. This is me being petty.

The idea of a Customer Service Week does not excite me – a consumer of services that require regular customer service – phone, internet, banking, etc. This is because in most of our organizations, customer service is a department that is charged with keeping customers placated, and not actually solving customer problems.

Think about the last time you called customer service. This is what must have happened:

1. An automated machine picked up and asked you to press a number that corresponded to the problem you needed fixed.
2. After pressing that number, the machine asked you to press another number to try solve it yourself. If you are smart enough, you didn’t press that other number (because you know that self service never works), and you waited for the machine to get to the last option “to speak to a customer care representative, press 9”. Pro tip: if there is an option for Premier/Platinum customer service, always pick that option even if you are not a Premier/Platinum customer. The customer service people will pick the call faster and they won’t even notice your deception.
3. That option got you a different voice with a different message. “All our customer representatives are busy. Please hold the line. Your call is very important to us”. You hold the line, feeling very important.
4. Finally, a cheery customer service person comes on the line “thank you for calling {insert name here}, how may I help you?”.
5. You proceed to describe your problem. In most instances, the customer service person is not able to assist. “It seems there is a technical problem, I have raised it with our technical team and they will call you back/resolve it in an hour”

Only the very naïve will wait for this call back. In an hour, you will do 1-5 again, and again, until you either give up, ask them to connect you to a manager, go on Twitter to shame them into responding, or call your sibling who has many Twitter followers to shame them into responding.

I am told that Safaricom is the exception to this rule, their customer service staff are able to resolve technical problems. I cannot attest to this as have not needed to call Safaricom in years, which says something.

The problem here is not that customer service staff are not trained. From experience, all are very well trained in customer service. They are very pleasant and try to de-escalate when an angry customer calls, which is what a good customer service rep should do. The problem is that organizations do not care about customers or customer service.

I will take it a step further and say that organizations do not care about their customer service staff.

See these companies create these problems either through neglect, incompetence, or inefficiency. They then hire and deploy customer service team members to keep the problem away – to placate angry customers. This sounds like a set up and mistreatment to me.  Companies love to mistreat their customer service staff, then celebrate them once in a while with initiatives such as the Customer Service Week.

If a company really wants to fix customer issues, they should dismantle the customer service department. Instead of linking customers to the customer care agent to placate them, customers should be able to select the department that actually deals with the issue and then talk to a technical person who can actually help, or a manager who can make a decision if that is what needs to be done.

So here is my proposal for Customer Service Week. Instead of sending us texts, and meeting in hotels to discuss customer service (and other such initiatives), deploy your managers and technical people to the customer service call centre. Let them spend the week picking up customer calls and resolving issues. Give the customer service team and their managers a much-needed break – feel free to use the board members’ budget to send them to Mombasa – they need the rest.

This will be a Customer Service Week with a difference, this I know.

Photo credit:Pavan Trikutam