Check It or Forget It

Several interesting marketing items to report.  

Basically about customer service. OH, do you NOT separate the two and think that these two elements are two sides of the same coin?  I hope you do. Because you can market the best, the most innovative, the most unique program, but if no one cares about the delivery of the product at the center level, guess what?  You lose a customer that you worked so hard to get.  And that would be a shame.

Last week, some jackass hijacked, hacked, cracked and smacked my email.  I thought that was an easy fix. HA!  He had also cracked jacked and smacked my Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Linked-In account.  In fact some 2000 people on my blog list, Facebook list and twitter list were affected.  If I haven’t apologized to you, please accept my apologies now.

It literally took me the better part of half a day to fix this stuff.  But before I took it on, I decided to give all these high tech companies a shot to test their customer service skills.

Here’s what I found out:

1.   They all suck, with the exception of one which I will tell you about.

2.  It is virtually impossible to find a phone number to call; a friend turned me onto a website about phone numbers for these companies so I was able to access them.

3.  Minimum hold times for any of them were one half hour plus; I left after a half hour.

4.  God forbid if you accidentally turn your phone off or another call comes in and you lose the tech call; you re toast and have to start ALL over.

5.  You are guaranteed to be asked your name, account number, password, social security number, first born’s weight at birth and your second grade teacher’s middle name.

6.  You will eventually be transferred to someone from India, Pakistan, China or some other country where the accents create a bit of a listening problem; at least for me.

7.  These folks will try as hard as possible to solve your problem, but ultimately you end up with “the high tech supervisor” who also tries to take care of it and in half the cases is successful.

8.  Rest assured that after it is fixed, another problem unrelated to the first will occur or a pop up will appear asking you if you want to buy “PC Protection.

9.  The only company that got back to me in a reasonable time was “Carbonite” that discovered my “in the cloud account” and was able to restore it in less than 5 minutes as well as send me a confirmation email

10.  The machines always win and you and the tech folks are mere pawns when the winds of tech turmoil blow.  I am still out of business about sending my blog out to a different list on a different server that refuses to accept my new password.

 

With that being said, I implore you to check your customer service policies.  Here is a story I heard that a proprietor bragged to me about. Seems that a woman and three children came in at 4pm to take advantage of a special that started at 6pm. 

The desk person refused to honor the woman’s request even though there was NOT one lane running.  And the proprietor told me that the desk person did the right thing!!.  I flipped out and told him that the woman will now go home; knowing she and her family will never come back, and no doubt told at least 14 other people about the “dumb” desk clerk.

Now I’m not saying this happens at your center, but with the season getting under way, this might be a good time to check your customer service and retrain your people.

A wise proprietor friend of mine, Wally Hall, said, “The successful business is one that offers a unique service or product.  Your unique service or product is  YOUR customer service.

Check it or forget it.