Sometimes I feel like dealing with customer service departments makes me out to just be another grumbling asshole when in reality I just want an answer that makes sense.
Not the copy & paste response that isn’t even relevant to my problem.
Not one that is just blatantly guessing on your part.
I just want a legitimate answer that justifies the problem that I’m experiencing, and bonus points if you can actually help me to solve my problem, too!
I think part of my issue comes from having a developer’s mindset because when I see an issue with a company’s website that I have to interact with, I don’t simply want an apology for the inconvenience … I want to know what’s wrong so that other people don’t have the same problem in the future, too!
In a way, systems are easy because they’re consistent, or at least they should be. If designed properly, a website should look the same to me as it does to you … the 1,000th text message that you send should be delivered just as the first 999 were … when banking transactions don’t all post to your account in a consistent manner, that should be a red flag for anyone concerned about how the online banking system is working.
In my scenario, I scheduled five transfers from my checking account on Friday – when I woke up and looked in my account, four of the transactions were pending, but one was missing.
This seemed odd to me because when I do regular, unscheduled transfers, every transaction always shows as pending immediately regardless of where the transfer is going to.
…and mind you, these are all transfers within the same bank…
All in all, I talked with six representatives across different customer service departments – some had different explanations than others, some clearly didn’t want to be talking to me at all, and even the final supervisor that I spoke with couldn’t really say why it was happening but at least offered an alternative to what I was having an issue with.
I mean, I get that most customer service reps don’t understand their company’s systems well enough to identify where a process is failing. Hell, I’ve had issues where I’ve had to talk to multiple developers to get to the one who could speak accurately to their own application for building new ones! But regardless of your knowledge of a given system, I think it’s a fair suggestion that anyone should be able to recognize one of these things is not like the others to help identify when the system might be behaving incorrectly so that those with more know-how can investigate those types of scenarios in more detail.
And don’t get me wrong – I’ve worked in a call center myself so I totally get that a lot of people just don’t care because as soon as my call disconnects, they’ll have another pissed off customer in their ear to deal with next … but that shouldn’t be the gold standard because you can’t improve customer service through apathetic customer service representatives. Good customer service starts with identifying that a customer is upset and then dissecting their issue into something you can work with, whether it’s through education or process improvement or even a bug fix.
It doesn’t neither of us any good for you to just say, “I don’t know what else to say – that’s just how it works…” unless you’re looking to keep your complaint level high.
It reminds me of another situation that I had earlier this year – I was driving home one day and noticed that one of the signs leading onto the interstate was wrong.
Huh?!
I even drove back that way a second time to double-check myself before saying anything. They were doing a lot of construction around a new interchange, and the arrow definitely indicated that one lane was split for both north and south … even though it really only went south.
So after mulling over who to even report that kind of thing to, I found a contact on the Florida DOT website for our area and explained the situation … to which I got a fairly curt reply stating that I was incorrect because the guy’s field engineers said that it was fine.
The next day I drove down and took pictures.
A few more days passed before he finally replied again that the road had just been reconfigured and now matched the sign overhead, so everything was ok. I drove through one more time, and he was correct.
But how hard would it have been to just say that they were in the middle of changing things over and the sign had gotten updated before the lines were repainted on the road???
I know that customer service is often depicted as a shit job that nobody likes because it’s nothing but people complaining at you all day long, but what if you were to take a step back and put yourself in the shoes of the person on the other end of the line?
Be the guy who got on the interstate going the wrong way because the sign was wrong.
Be the guy who wondered all weekend if his mortgage payment got pulled from somebody else’s account by mistake.
And then don’t just gloss over this issues with an “Oops!” – actually take the next step towards solving them so that they don’t have to happen all over again.
It’s the difference between “Give us a break – the sign’s fixed now!” and “Sorry about that – we’ll make sure our contractors know to cover up those parts of the signs that aren’t correct until the new lanes are opened to prevent that in the future…”
Or “Yeah, I can see why you would expect all of your online transfers to appear the same. This is how our system behaves today, but let me open a ticket with our development team so they can look into changing that.”
The more you act like you actually want to fix my issue from happening again, the less I’ll sound like just another grumbling asshole when I’m explaining it to you.
…mainly because hopefully it won’t be the sixth time I’ve had to explain the same issue over and over again to apathetic ears that are just counting down the time until their next break… 😛
