Guest Blog Post: A Little Acknowledgement Goes a Long Way
Over the past week I’ve seen my share of Good and Bad Customer Service.
Let’s start with the bad shall we? It’s Wednesday night, the day before the girlfriend and I take a trip to California to see her family. I’m tired after a day behind a desk doing what I do for a day job and I had just finished taking my mother into town to do shopping for the rest of the family. My girlfriend and I go into a local chain store for some quarters to do a load of laundry. We go up to the Customer Service counter and stand in line and we’re next up with two people working at the counter. After one of the representatives finishes up with a customer, she leaves the counter with a line of four of us waiting. The other employee, still at the counter, is very slow with her customer and doesn’t acknowledge anyone else waiting in line. We stand there for about seven minutes before they are finished.
As a person who works in customer service, I understand that longer-than-normal handle times happen from time to time. However, when you’re handling customers face-to-face, you need to be able to meet a customer’s needs in a timely fashion. For those situations that may take a little more time than expected, at least let anyone who is waiting in line know that you or someone else will be with them shortly. Ignoring or simply not acknowledging the presence of those waiting makes them feel they are not that important as a customer, which of course is a really good way to lose business.
Jared Morgan will be 21 in December and hails from Roseburg, Oregon. He is an employee for a Call Center and is a Dedicated Phone.com representative. His hobbies include racing cars, working on cars, working on computers, graphics work for VHR and Roller Skating.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mf1customs
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Terrific post Jared! Being that we work in a call center, our queue is on the phone, email or chat support and not live and in person but imagine that everyone is waiting in the phone queue is in a physical line. How does that change how we serve those customers. I imagine many of them might feel ignored especially when they can’t see the person on the other line.
I can certainly see how frustrating that is. I know some companies have the technology to calculate about how much time they’ll be waiting. Unfortunately not everyone can do that. Which of course is why Hold music was invented, and why we have more than one means of contact. Most companies use a mix of Phone, Chat and email support in one way or another. For some, one is easier than another, or is faster than another. Of course, Phone is faster when you can get through a queue, but Email is easier for a lot. I myself would go with the Chat approach.
Today with our outage, I was able to see about 10 people waiting in line, And I’m sure they’re all frustrated about the outage they’d just experienced. It would be nice to jump in the middle and let them know ‘Hey, We’re having a problem and we’re well aware of it. We’ll be with you soon’. But unfortunately we can’t. There again, the reasoning behind hold music. Of course we all would get tired of hearing ‘Your call is very important to us. Please wait on the line and you will be connected to an agent shortly’ after a few minutes, but aside from that, what we can do on the phone is very limited.