If you have dealt with the firms competing to take care of your communications and entertainment needs, you know how good they are at providing offers to entice you to sign up with them, just to shut the door in your face after you have become a client and need assistance.
When you dial their “toll-free” number for assistance, the trouble begins. You will have to listen to obnoxious tapes and make automated choices as a result. The options may or may not extend to your case. When you make choices, the machine often becomes confused, and you must re-enter them on your computer keypad or by voice prompts, which the system often does not understand. The best way I’ve learned to get anywhere is to keep saying “Agent” on the phone, despite the fact that the machine doesn’t give you the option until much later in the process after you’ve wasted a lot of time. You may also locate a more direct phone number by doing an Internet search, but most of those are shut down just as quickly as they get viral.
False hopes even when you get in touch with an agent
If you are fortunate enough to hear a human voice, you are almost certainly speaking with someone in another country who is the real-life Peggy.
When I called for service recently, “Peggy” was in India. He began answering me the same questions that the automatic machine had already replied. Worse, he didn’t pay attention to my responses and he kept asking me the same questions. I informed him that I had conducted a speed test and that the findings were appalling. Nonetheless, he demanded that I repeat the test because that thing was on his “running interference” checklist. I use the term “running interference” since it seems to be the first human voice’s main concern. Since there aren’t plenty of them, they’re defending others that can fix the issue fast. To make matters worse, in the process, both of the agents add salt to their customers’ wounds by repeating the most vexing word they all learned in “customer support, “I apologize for the inconvenience.” They say it in such a robotic and insincere manner that you suspect they don’t mean what they say.
Wrong-way to treat the customers
The argument is that a customer does not have to go through this unpleasant, infuriating, and enraging experience. If the CEOs of these businesses knew what their clients go through, they would immediately put a stop to it. That is the main component of the problem. The individual in charge of these businesses either has no idea what’s going on in the trenches or doesn’t care. If the problem is not fixed, these “support” providers are likely to follow in the footsteps of other tone-deaf businesses. Companies who neglect their consumers’ suffering do so at their risk.
What should ISPs do?
Businesses that transform consumer issues into ways to strengthen customer relationships are more likely to succeed and thrive in the long run. In an intensely competitive marketplace, how they treat challenges will be the difference between success and failure.
The complaint is a warning sign that must not be overlooked. Customers who complain have an incentive for the organization to correct a problem and strengthen its operations. What is the reason for this? Customers work in their own best interests because they are in a great position to tell the business the whole truth – which your staff is unable to do because it might affect their results because they are afraid you will “shoot the messenger” rather than listen to the message. AT&T customer service team is one of those customer service teams that take customer feedback very seriously, which helps them to look at their flaws from the customer point of view, which in turn, increases customer loyalty. About any systematic report on the topic shows that businesses that transform grievances into positives have a better chance of succeeding.
Lifetime Value of a Customer
Customers are much more important to keep for services that charge recurring rates as they pay a lot of money per month. If they bother to calculate how much consumers contribute in subscription premiums over the course of a typical lifespan, the case for decent customer service will become very convincing. This metric is just one aspect of the value equation from a business perspective. When you factor in the influence of the word-of-mouth pyramid that each customer will create, you get a multiplier of dozens of people saying positive or negative things about a business for every happy or wronged customer.