Recently, I stepped into a social media admin role to investigate for a client how well their customer relations were being run. It opened my eyes to the warzone that some business theorists call customer care.
For sure, it’s a strange view from the other side, when you consider how frustrating it is to be a customer trying to get redress for a product issue from a company. When any one of us has a paid-for product fail, it can evoke many emotions, none of which are super joyful. We are generally pretty fed up. And we rarely seem to get a solution through a number or account that gets us straight through to someone who simply sorts the issue.
You would think that was actually operationally impossible, indeed, for all the times it does not happen and is not there.
Yet the day that one of my client’s customers opened a complaint by posting that everyone at the company was ‘scum’ definitely began to colour my thinking on how ‘right’ the customer always is.
Once I dug in to the care problem, I did find a strange attitude embedded at some subliminal level. The staff handling complaints were not long on empathy.
Indeed, it has since struck me, looking at it, that any company that seeks a really fantastic customer care delivery should begin by staffing it with people who ‘feel’ the pain of others.
That said, maybe those who do couldn’t last even a week in customer care. Because the anger and abuse are a sight to behold.
For it’s an interface at which every personal psychological disposition gets brought to the table, in the great big ‘you cheated me’ chase. The aggressive are hurling rocks before they can even get to the substance of what has gone wrong with their item. Others play games of blame shifting while the care desk tries every way to reach them to fix the problem.
But many are just regular customers, with an issue. Yet the staff handling those issues are battle weary.
Some few bruises from the very unreasonable and they have become suspicious of everyone. Their communication is no better or more concrete than most of the complainants, making for threads and customer care tickets that are a journey through the unsaid and the slowest of progressions towards resolution.
Yet above all, the customer care ‘no-no’ comes down to two substantial missing bases, and both are about communication. In a ‘them and us’ world where the customers are the difficult people on the other side, staff don’t take time to honour customers who have had a bad experience with a factual explanation of what is being done to solve the problem, exactly why there is any delay whatsoever, or, particularly importantly, what the company is doing to make sure the same problem never arises again.
Add that triple into the mix and even the most unhappy of customer feels heard, and their issue addressed. It doesn’t take away the inconvenience just caused, but it does restore respect and trust and lead to an ever-improving company that doesn’t keep stumbling on the same issues over and over again. Of course, that’s easy to see from the outside.
Relentless, day in, day out, ‘you are useless’, ‘you guys are the worst’, and ‘take my product away’ from customers who expect to be badly treated, or have already been poorly informed or kept waiting, doesn’t tend to make for fresh, helpful customer care every day, over and over.
But the customer care team that is a champion for the customer, that picks up their cases and goes anywhere and everywhere to get an answer – now that team reforms a business.
So, dear business, know that, in life, some few people are just abusive. But even fewer companies have cracked the code on genuine customer care and championing, and those that do, they fly.
For that grumpy, fed up, conflictual customer will be your most loyal customer forever, if only you just take their problem seriously, and fix it, fast.
Sometimes businesses are not malicious to their customers. That might seem obvious to many, but not to all, to judge.
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