Customers Think You Are C**ts

Photo via Bonnie Almedia

Recently a family member has been plagued by bad customer service, particularly by an Internet provider who tried to charge for an extra two months even after the provider had been switched.

So, this family member calls up and kindly asks if they can take this charge from the bill, yet the bloke on the other end of the phone replies with something similar to “Sorry, I can’t help you. You will just have to pay it.”

Sadly for the bloke who was in the overseas call centre, this family member likes a good argument. They then started to shout down the phone till and eventually demanded to speak to a supervisor, at which point the employee said this “Was not possible.” As you can imagine, the noise levels in the house suddenly became a lot higher and this continued for an hour or so. Eventually a rather frustrated figure walked back into the room where we all sat rather sheepishly and muttered, “They will call back tomorrow.”

The next day the phone rang and a Scottish bloke on the other end asked for the family member. And after a few minutes it was all sorted, with the man on the other end of the phone stating that “He’d be pissed off too.”

This got the cogs turning a bit and we’ve come to the conclusion that no amount of advertising will work if you have a bad product or customer service. It may well mask the flaws or get first time buyers to purchase the product, but the changes of a repeat purchase are low. To us, it seems that the best option is to work hard to make sure you have a reliable product and to secondly make sure you have a good support system for your customers. We think that there must be a way to bypass the bad training and lack of understanding that most people encounter with customer service.

With this, we’ve been throwing a few ideas around and are going to try and work on something to try and make the customer experience a little more bearable.

We’ll keep you posted on any developments.