Bad Customer Service
Have you ever spoken to someone on the phone and got the feeling they didn’t care? We all know that feeling. We’ve all experienced it. You call a company or visit a website, and there’s no one there. The person you’re trying to reach is either too busy or can’t be bothered to answer your question.
There are plenty of reasons for providing bad customer service. For example, some companies may be trying to cut costs, or maybe they’re just not very good at the work they do. And sometimes bad service is the result of a company that’s not very good at providing service.
It’s a common business strategy to cut costs by providing inadequate customer support. Indeed, you can’t expect the companies to admit they’re doing it, but you might be able to guess when they are.
The companies that deliberately provide insufficient customer support are those where (a) the product or service is cheap and (b) the company is big enough that individual customers don’t matter much to them. An airline is a classic example. The cost of your ticket may be only $200, but if you have a problem, you’re unlikely to do anything about it except write a complaint letter—and airlines know that their complaint letters get filed and then forgotten. So they go ahead and mistreat you.
If you’re one of the many customers, and the company has millions of dollars in revenue, it doesn’t matter much if you decide to take your business elsewhere because of bad service. Or if the company offers a free service (like an airline’s frequent flyer miles or a bank’s ATM network), bad service doesn’t cost much in lost business; people who want free stuff put up with poor service.
Some companies intentionally don’t improve their customer services. Some even consider lousy customer service to be an effective strategy.
Here’s why:
Bad Customer Service is Ineffective
It may like a good idea, at first, to treat customer service chat poorly to discourage them from coming back. But it makes businesses more reliant on existing customers and less concerned about finding new ones. Excellent customer service builds loyalty, but bad service can drive people away. If you’re looking for a quick fix, offering poor service may seem tempting. But you’re sacrificing long-term success for short-term gains.
Mistreating Customers is Not Sustainable
Customer satisfaction isn’t just about making them happy when they visit your business. It’s also about making sure that they remember you favorably when they leave and share their experiences with others. To accomplish this, companies need to focus on providing outstanding service at every point of contact, be it online or in person.
Cost Cutting
When companies cut down on operational costs to compensate for narrow margins, customer service also becomes a lethal target. It is because customer service is expensive and not taken seriously.
But cutting good customer service can have a lasting effect on a company’s reputation and ultimately its bottom line. Customers who feel mistreated once are less likely to return, even if the company offers them good deals and friendly service in the future. So treating customers well is not only It can pay off for companies in the long run.
Focus On Price Then Value
But there’s a problem with this approach — customers don’t think about price and quality separately. Instead, their view of price is a measure of value. And if you’re going to make an effort to comparison-shop, you want to know what you’re getting for your money — which means customer support.
Treating customer service as an afterthought is likely to backfire. In their excellent book “The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error,” Sidney Dekker and John Hollnagel describe a case where an airline outsourced customer service to a third party and then forgot to tell its customers. As a result, they had to go through a third party when they called up looking for support. Eventually, they figured out what had happened and expressed their displeasure by switching carriers.
In conclusion, customer service is one of the most valuable weapons in a business’s arsenal because it is readily available. Most companies can afford to invest in customer service. It doesn’t require expensive equipment or software, just good old-fashioned human interaction.
On the lookout for companies providing exceptional customer service? Check out Spectrum Tv Customer Service and enter your area code to locate your nearest service provider for TV and the Internet. You can thank us later!
