Working in the industry or as an IT or CX professional, you have certain expectations of the customer service engagements you experience in your personal life. Knowing the state of the possible, perhaps, it’s hard not to hold all companies to a higher standard.
I’ve had a couple of reasons to call a company’s customer service center of late. One left me highly satisfied—issue resolved quickly and pleasantly. The other wasn’t horrible enough to drive me to public ranting, but it did cause me aggravation and left me a bit irritated. I managed to tell the agent why I was calling and what information I needed, and why I needed it quickly, before the call disconnected—not sure why. I missed the agent’s return call (foiled by my “Unknown number” setting, but he did leave a voicemail saying that he thought what I wanted to do was permissible, but that he wanted to double-check with the compliance team to make sure and he would email me shortly with a response. Great! Except… more than 24 hours later, with me checking my Inbox and Spam folders repeatedly, and no email.
I initiated a follow-up call, and while I did promptly receive the confirmation I needed, the agent said something that irritated me a bit. She said she was going to remove the email send request so that I didn’t think the other agent had forgotten about me. But hadn’t he already? I had been promised the information via email “shortly”—that to me meant quickly, or at least within the same day. Clearly customer service could see that the email hadn’t gone out, so why did I have to initiate the call rather than the company reaching back out to me, even if it was just to say, “We’re still looking into your question?” Why didn’t it have processes in place to catch and alert the agent on that? I see that as a failed opportunity to deliver good service.
Again, I wasn’t irked enough to take any action on this, but others might not be so complacent. (And maybe I wouldn’t have been, either, had it been a different sort of transaction or company—say, a return request for a retailer rather than a funds transfer question of a financial services firm.) Metrigy recently surveyed 502 consumers about what they do when they have a bad experience with a company, and lots of folks apparently aren’t too shy about letting their dissatisfaction be known: 44.4% tell friends and family about their bad experience, 26.1% leave negative reviews on ratings websites, and 12.4% post on social media.
Troubling is that many businesses may not recognize their CX failures. Whereas 36% of consumers say customer service, in general, has gotten worse in the last year, most companies give themselves positive ratings on customer satisfaction. That is, when we asked them to tell us how they’d rate their customers’ satisfaction when interacting with their contact center, 32.7% said “Excellent” (more than 90% are satisfied) and 45.4% said “Good” (between 80% and 89% are satisfied).
Many companies, it seems, need to take a harder look at how their customers really feel about their service and support—and though they may seem like dated options, phone and email are good places to start. These are the top two ways consumers interact with companies, with phone even being the preference for 44% and email the preference for 16%, according to our research.
