Customer Service - You're Doing It Wrong, the Legacy Edition

Many years ago, Joey was friends with an older lady who left him a number of paintings on silk that she and her husband brought home with them from the Philippines. They dated from about the time of the Vietnam war, and Joey thought they might be worth something as antiques. So, being young, naive and this being prior to the era of being able to research companies on the internet before you actually go there, we found the names of several antiques dealers in town in the phone book and set out with a few of the paintings in hand to see if they were worth anything.

It was then that I learned some vital lessons on customer service, the first one being that you should never, EVER become complacent, regardless of the all positive hype about your company and two, that a bad customer service experience leaves a longer-lasting mark than you think.

You see, Joey and I had the misfortune of stopping at Zee Faulkner Antiques. We had the second misfortune of dealing with the lady herself.

Zee Faulkner is quite the local character around here, and her downtown mansion/gallery was impossible to miss, painted a shade of powder pink that stood out among the more traditional buildings in that neighborhood. While Ms. Faulker had mastered the art of self promotion and the art of appealing to the local members of the Great and the Good, she apparently never mastered that prized art of Southern Hospitality. Instead she had all the charm of a bitchy head cheerleader of a two-bit rural school who makes sure to sign your yearbook noting the page that shows her off to her rah-rah best so you won't forget it. In fact, that pretty much sums up the customer service Ms. Faulkner had on offer to the two bewildered young folks standing in the midst of her vainglorious mansion. She literally sneered down her nose at the both of us without a greeting, then turned away to flip the pages of the magazine on prominent display in the foyer, to make sure that it was showing the article on her favorite subject - her. After that, she was done with us and waved us to the servant's entrance door, where her office manager quietly suggested we try another antiques dealer just down the road.

The other antiques dealer was a kindly gent, and he explained that the paintings weren't worth much of anything other than sentimental value, which was all we were trying to find out in the first place. Ms. Faulkner's lesson in what not to do when it comes to giving good customer service was a side bonus of the trip, but even after all this time, it still sets my teeth on edge.

Customer Service: You're doing it wrong

A short aside - I know the actual meme is "UR doin it wrong" but I can't force myself to type "ur" as a word, even in the pursuit of meme references. Ur was a place, it could possibly be an abbreviation, but it isn't a word. We all clear on that? Good.

Yesterday I was reading the tale of a very angry customer and a company that was so caught up in their own marketing that they decided it was better to alienate their customer than to address the customer's concerns. The company's product had failed the customer and caused her to incur additional expenses on top of what she'd already paid for the product itself. After some difficulty in contacting the company's customer service department, our intrepid customer finally got an answer from the company, an answer which managed to not only not address her issue with the product, but implied that the customer had misused the product, AND included a not-at-all-veiled sales pitch for more of the company's products!

Yeah, because nothing will make a customer feel valued faster than telling them they're too stupid to use the product they've already purchased from you, then trying to shill more stuff at them in the guise of addressing their concerns.

Marketing has its place in a business strategy. That place is not when addressing a customer complaint. But it's happening more and more every day. Here's another example:

A while back, I stopped at a restaurant to have a sandwich. When the sandwich arrived, it was a fatty, greasy, disgusting mess. I didn't have time to send the sandwich back to be remade or to get a different sandwich, so I ate what I could and left the restaurant in high enough dudgeon that I contacted the company and expressed my dissatisfaction with their product. I stated that I did not want the usual "Be Our Guest" free item offer that usually follows these requests, I just wanted to make them aware of the problem so they could fix it. A customer service rep emailed me back, stating that she was sorry that I'd had a bad experience and wanted to offer me the "Be Our Guest" free item anyway. Had she left it that, it would have been an okay transaction. But she didn't leave it at that. She went on to comment that the reason I'd had a bad experience with the sandwich was because I didn't understand or appreciate the richer, higher quality ingredients that they'd sourced just to make this hot mess of a sandwich. Well, maybe I didn't understand the intrinsic wonder of the foodstuffs that made up the disgusting mess that was my sandwich, and maybe I'm just some ill-bred cretin who wouldn't know quality ingredients if they sashayed up and subjected me to a Gordon Ramsey tirade about how goddamn fucking wonderful they are and I'm a donkey's arse to not appreciate them, but I did understand one thing all too well after receiving that email - that I'd gone from a customer with a concern to a customer that was good and pissed off.

How, exactly, did that help the company in keeping me as a customer? What purpose did it serve to inject marketing spin into a conversation that should have focused on turning a customer with a problem into a customer who wants to give your business another shot? It didn't.

When your customer contacts you with a problem, you get one chance to make it right. Sometimes you're lucky if you have that. Why ruin the chance you have? How hard is it to say "I'm sorry you did not have a good experience with my product. What can I do to make it right?" You may never be able to make it completely right, and sometimes the customer isn't going to be satisfied no matter what you do, but the point to the whole exercise is to turn a customer with a problem into a satisfied customer who wants to come back to you. You're not going to do that by patronizing them, shilling to them, or ignoring the problem they brought you in the first place.