Bad Customers can challenge even great customer service
Here’s the scene. A lady bought a refrigerator and a stove for her new house. She called to say that she thought her thermostat wasn’t working on the oven and they tried trouble shooting the problem on the phone within the first six months. It’s a sixty dollar service call after all, even tho the work would be free – so she thought. The trouble shooting didn’t fix it. She called again a month later, got a different person who did the same things. Finally, in despair she quit trying to get the problem fixed. She never told them she’d tried this already and never told them it still wasn’t working. Fast Forward four and a half years. The oven is still not fixed. Every time she bakes and it’s not good she says “It’s that damned stove from Mongo’s!” Here’s the thing… they didn’t know they hadn’t fixed it the second time.
So, four and a half years later I walk onto the show room and explain what had happened to the owner of the local business. I explained she felt like she was bothering them and didn’t want to upset anybody, but she’d been using a counter top toaster oven for four years and complaining to everybody who would listen about how bad they were and I knew that wasn’t true and wanted to help. I too had a local business on the same street and we’d seen enough businesses on that street go out of business to big box stores. Couldn’t lose another one. An empty street hurts all of us. So, I bought a part, one of two things that could cause the problem. I asked him to lie if she called, say he’d just given it to her to make it better. He said, “But that makes us look like the good guy and we weren’t!”
I grinned and said “We both know that but she won’t and you need image repair in her eyes.” The thing is, THEY didn’t know they had a problem. She hadn’t made it clear to them in a way they understood that there was something wrong. She just ran around telling everybody how bad they were. I think she dropped the ball by not letting them know it was still broken. I thought they dropped the ball too, but not following up, but so did she… also by not following up. I wanted to fix it. I was tired of undercooked fish, and feared undercooked pork would kill me one day if she used the oven.
The part didn’t fix it so I went back. The next part was expensive. She said she’d buy another stove first, and not from them. I explained this to them. Asked what could we do to fix it because I really didn’t want them to lose a customer and every customer whose shopping she influenced because I KNEW they were better than this.
The owner’s wife was working the counter that day and got me free service calls. The part at cost, and an apology. This is four and a half years after the thing was bought, well outside of warranty. She wanted to make sure her customers were taken care of. The owner did as well, and both of those people were doing what they could to take care of the situation once they found out about it. The family and she were happy with the resolution. I hope the owners are happy with it. I’m glad they stepped up. They had a chance to lose a lot of face with a lot of people. There were lots of eyes on them for this thing.
If a customer doesn’t complain we, as customer service people, salesmen, never have a chance to make sure they’re happy. “Service after the sale” is more than a saying on a banner. I think Ted Porter gets it too. I heard him recently on The Story on NPR. He talks about how his Employee & Customer Service focus is what’s keeping him going strong through these troubled economic times (take a drink). Listen to his story on TheStory.org.
One of the things I like about Ted Porter’s story is when he talks about how important it is to him, how his job satisfaction is based on having happy customers. That sort of person WILL have happy customers. In my business we are pretty small, we don’t have everything our customers want, but I’ve trained my employees when possible to help the employee find who DOES have the thing they’re looking for. If the customer leaves us happy, but without what they want that’s better than them leaving us disappointed in us without what they want. If we don’t have it they’re going to leave empty handed. I’d rather they left happy than not. When I bought my car my salesman called two days later to ask how I was liking it and if there was anything he could do for me about the car, any concerns I had. He gets it. He knows it’s about the customer. Not just because it’s a feel good thing… but because happy customers come back.
A friend of mine has a survey about Customer Service and how it has or has not changed in recent months. If you have a minute or two, it really is short and quick, give it a look. I’ll let you know when the results are posted.
The Bad Customers can challenge even great customer service by Rich Griffith, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
April 19th, 2009 at 1:55 AM
Is this really good customer service vs. a bad customer? Yes, the customer failed to complain to the right people about the problem, but the company also failed to follow through on the initial sale after the fact. If you actually care about your company’s word-of-mouth reputation, than you need to follow up on the sales and make sure your customer is happy, or at least has a means to inform you of a grievance.
I’m assuming they delivered and installed the stove. If they had taken the initiative to send out a brief postage paid postcard to their customers they probably would have gotten a response and could’ve fixed the problem while the stove was still under the manufacturer warranty.
The postcard is non-confrontational. Some people are intimidated when complaining to a real person. And it’s probably not too common to get one from a satisfied customer, but when people feel they’ve been screwed or mistreated, they’ll take any opportunity to bitch about to someone who cares and can make amends.
It’s not like this is a revolutionary idea. Companies have been doing this for decades on big ticket sales. And nowerdays companies can move the whole thing to email and save the few bucks they were spending on postage. You can’t blame a customer for not bringing their dissatisfaction to your attention when you made no effort to follow up after the sale. Companies that do this and resolve the problem are the companies that get, and deserve, the good word of mouth press, and they usually get a lot more out of an initially unsatisfactory situation they took the initiative and resolved than one where everything went perfect the first time around.
April 19th, 2009 at 7:09 AM
You’re absolutely right mistakes were made on by sides. Blame was, equally shared in my eyes, and they have since made it right to everybody’s satisfaction taking into account the time since it happened and the level of non-communication they were dealing with.
The part where they didn’t do it right is easy to point the finger and is why I sort of glossed over it, but the part where the customer can be at fault too was something I wanted to point out. I’ve been in the situation where the first I’ve ever heard of a problem from a customer is when they’re saying “… and I’ll never come here again because of …” and I’m like, if they’d told me sooner it would have been fixed.
People who save things up until they’re at that point are perennial victims and are worse for business than a “raving fan” is good for business. These are also people who tend to never have a good meal at a restaurant, good hotel room at a hotel, or a good experience buying a car. And always because they don’t tell the ppl something went wrong, but they tell everybody else who will listen. That is unfair to the business as if you don’t give us a chance to fix it how are we supposed to know it needs fixing? If we return to your table and ask if everything’s OK and you say “Yes.” How are we to know you asked for Ranch dressing but got French? If you say it’s OK to us, but then tell everybody else “They got the dressing wrong and I knew from then on that nothing was going to be right… can’t even get the salad course right. Terrible help there, probably badly trained, and you know if you complain they spit in your food! What else could I do but eat it?”
Yeah, the store dropped the ball, but the customer definitely does too sometimes.