I know this is meant to be Traffic Tuesday, and in a way it is. Get ready for a rant!
Maybe I just attract the wrong kind of people, or maybe customer service standards – online and offline – are really as bad as I think they are. I’ve encountered 3 examples of appalling customer service in the last 2 days alone. That’s got to be some kind of record.
Surely the primary task of a salesperson is to guide you to the point of parting with your money. Seeking to help you if you need help, answering your questions about the product (or at least directing you to someone who can), and generally adding to the customer experience so that you would happily shop in the same place again. Because, as we all know, loyal, repeat customers are the goal of any successful business – unless you’re in the Adsense game of course.
The first incident resulted in a lost sale for the store involved. I knew basically what I wanted to buy. The value of the purchase was about $60, so not insubstantial. All I wanted to know was if it was OK to get a better look at the product before I bought it. Sounds simple. right?
Well, there were 3 sales assistants close by – this was not a large store but part of a large chain of stores, nor was it very busy – one of them was busy making plans for the evening on her phone, and the other 2 were so engrossed … in a game of Tag … that they didn’t hear my “excuse me”.
In the end I took the product out of its package and assembled it to decide if it was what I wanted. Nobody bothered me or asked to “assist” while I did this. I can’t be sure they even noticed. When I was done I re-packaged it and looked up to see that, in order to purchase the product I would have to spoil the fun the salespeople seemed to be having. I didn’t want to do that, so in the end I just walked out.
The second incident occurred in another big name chain store. I was shopping for something different this time. The item was reduced by $100 so I was keen to buy it in this store. However the salesperson couldn’t find the keys belonging to the product. Well, I was getting $100 off and this was the last item that they had in stock, so I was prepared to wait a while.
It took him 45 minutes to find the keys! During which time I was bombarded with customer-winning gems like “Why didn’t you buy it yesterday? I had the keys yesterday!”, and “Can you come back at the weekend? We’ll have more in stock then, but they will be at the full price”. I really should have given up sooner, but the attraction of a bargain can’t be underestimated!
I even suggested that he give me the display model instead, because I could see keys taped to the inside of it. But that only served to generate the bewildering response, “If I sell you the display model, I’ll have to sell someone else the one without keys”. I give up. Or at least, I was about to, when the keys eventually turned up. Thank God for that!
I’m strongly considering writing a course called “Basic logic for sales assistants” after that one.
Finally, I spent a fair amount of time trawling through the Knowledgebase of a product website trying to find if a particular product I wanted to buy was capable of being used in a specific way. I couldn’t find the answer so I emailed Customer Service and explained my question and that the Knowledgebase didn’t contain the answer.
You probably know what I received back. Yup. An email from Customer Service saying how important my question was to them and how happy they were to be able to help. An email into which they Cut-and-Pasted a section of their Knowledgebase which completely failed to answer my question.
The reason I place such an importance on Customer Service pre-purchase, is that if you have a problem after you’ve bought something, you’re going to encounter exactly the same ignorance and stupidity when you try to resolve it – only by then you’ll have parted with your cash!
Excellent customer service is such a core part of customer acquisition and customer retention, you should be watching and learning from it wherever you encounter it – online or offline. And over time, if you can’t provide top-notch Customer Service, all the Website Traffic in the world isn’t going to help you.
-Mark Wilson.