According to John Tschohl from the Service Quality Institute, CEO’s never experience what happens during the day and how ineffective most employees are at handling customer service.
These firms are unwilling to spend the money to train their staff to deliver awesome service. Instead, they spend millions on phony customer satisfaction surveys that few people respond to and nobody internally does anything with. If they spent this money training their staff on how to deliver great service, the money would be better spent. You must invest in your employees, and you have to really love customers.
Companies have a lot of stupid rules and policies, all to protect the company. I had a tenant whose gas was turned off on Friday. At about 9pm Friday night, we found out her gas meter was turned off and locked by Center Point Energy. She had no hot water. Only cold showers. Center Point turned off the wrong tenant’s meter, and when we called the emergency line, they said we had to wait until Monday morning at 7am to call them. We spent 21 minutes on the phone with an employee on their emergency line, and we accomplished nothing.
Netflix stock price is down as of July 10. They lost 200,000 subscribers from January–March. When they publish April–June results, it could be worse. You would think they would want to hang on to customers. They erased four years’ worth of growth. My daughter, who lives in Malaysia, wanted Netflix for her family, so we signed up. In May, we kept getting emails saying the account was going to expire while I was out of the country. If you pay every month, why would you want to close accounts on customers? I guess if you don’t value customers and stock prices. I gave her my credit card and told her to renew. The problem is she no longer had access in Malaysia after renewing.
When I got back to Minnesota, I called Netflix. They could not solve the problem. They would not refund the money and had no service recovery. The employee was fighting with me on the phone over R244 ($14.99). I tried to register again, but it no longer allowed my daughter’s children to watch Netflix in Malaysia. After cancelling online, they sent me a refund. This is a $30.4 billion-dollar company. I can see why they lost 200,000 customers over 90 days.
The most important employee in every company is the front-line employee who has 99% of the customer contact. Consistently these employees are the least paid, least trained and least valued everywhere in the world. If you want great customer service, you need to train all employees with something new and fresh every four months.
SERVICE QUALITY INSTITUTE
www.customer-service.com
