RSS feedI had an interesting visit to my site the other day by someone at Vodafone. I don’t know exactly why, it just popped up in my logs, but I’m guessing because they stumbled across my Dear Vodafone and your mp3 ringtone DRM, welcome to the blogosphere post.
That evening, I stumbled across a post in an online forum by someone who had been a customer support person at Vodafone, and was saying that to get the best results, you need to act nice and cordial, detail your exact problem clearly, and not to get frustrated. Here’s a partial quote:
People really need to learn that getting angry at customer service
representatives can only hurt you, not help you. 99.99% of the time, some
poor person who has nothing to do with your issue will be taking your shit
and will not WANT to help you.
Of course this is stating the obvious, but the problem here is that if this tends to have more success, then it is more indicative of a failing customer support system. A poor person who will not WANT to help you, shouldn’t be working in customer support, end of story.
When someone calls up support, they are usually frustrated with themselves that they can’t work out the problem, frustrated with the company that what they’re trying to do can be so difficult, and are likely to do more damage through word of mouth if they are not satisfied with the outcome. Frustration leads to extreme emotional states, and the more frustrated, the more unstable and angry we become. That’s human nature. Subsequently, the more angry the customer, probably the more serious their problem, and therefore the more important it is to solve their problem and make them happy.
Customer support personnel are supposed to be professionals, solving problems in emotionally charged situations, with knowledge and experience of psychology and how to deal with people as key requisite skills. Most companies however, treat customer support as a low income limited skill call centre process, usually staffed by out of work actors or HTML coders, who couldn’t give a shit about the person on the end of the phone.
Think about the last time you had to call a company for support, think about how frustrated and angry you may have been, and think about how they dealt with your call. I bet your current impression of said company matches your last experience with them on the phone.
Vodafone. Between their arrogance of removing most of the useful functionality from my phone, and their really crap customer support, I guess at least they’re consistent.