The Misery & Woe of Bad Customer Service

Guest Contributor, Paul Novak

Man I hate when people don’t stand behind their work.

I’m sure we’ve all been there. You make a purchase and regardless of any normal expectations of a simple and straightforward outcome, problems arise and you reluctantly suit up for battle and begin the first tentative steps towards resolution.

Perhaps you’re one of those beautiful and much in short supply souls who start out wonderfully optimistic and amicable.

Your efforts begin merely with a simple request that the problem or error please be fixed although in truth you are blind to the whole sordid mess just waiting behind the door of naiveté to engulf you in the grips of misery and woe.

Misery and Woe by the way are siblings who have been around since mankind first learned how to trade a crooked spear for someone else’s hard work. Their job is to kill optimism and amicability and they’ve been hugely successful thus far. If you’re in the habit of paying for things, expect to meet them at some point.

The Customer is Always Wrong

Perhaps your first attempts at resolution were met with what appears to be an understandable miscommunication or innocent appearing failure to grasp the scope or nature of the problem. No problem here, in our following communications we just work a little harder on making things understandable.

Unfortunately, instead of leading to some productive dialogue the problem escalates as you receive only perfunctory responses and suggestions implying your intelligence may not be allowing the product or services to have their full benefit.

Undaunted you continue, still naively expecting the problem to be fixed because well, you paid for the work and people do what’s right when someone pays them to do a job, correct?

Perhaps at this time you notice an oily residue that looks suspiciously like Misery and Woe beginning to seep in under the door, but you choose to ignore it in the hopes that things can still turn out OK.

You can admit it, denial isn’t a disease and we’ve all been there at some point or another. I’ve been known to rely heavily on denial at times myself. I’ve found it particularly useful for countering the effects of emotional and financial trauma when combined with alcohol in liberal doses.

The Sounds of Silence

So now you are out some cash, have a useless product or idle project, and the better part of the time you had expected to spend enjoying your now weeks old white elephant is instead spent trying to figure out how to salvage some value from it.

At this point you now notice that your requests are not being answered at all. Despite increasing the urgency and desperation of their tone, the silence has become deafening. By this time whatever hopes you had of meeting that deadline or launching that project have evaporated along with your last vestiges of faith in humanity.

You angrily pound out a sharply worded demand for a refund which is of course met with, more resounding silence.

Now fully engulfed in the slimy grip of despair you resign yourself to starting over, albeit with a bit less capital and an irrational hatred of an inanimate object.

Yes, the above recently happened to me, and it drove home with razor sharp clarity just how important cultivating and maintaining your professional integrity is.

After a quick round of Rum enhanced denial I decided I would put together a scathing review of the program I had purchased, and perhaps a less damning post on the merits of doing good business since after all, I am in the business of providing services myself.

I’ll save the scathing review for my blog where I can field what I hope will be scores of comments that will come from others as willing to swear a pox in this individual as myself. Here I’ll just talk about what I see as one of the most important aspects of any business, in particular, customer service.

Word of Mouth Isn’t Just Words

The first thing this incident brought to my mind was referrals.

Almost any profitable small business owner or entrepreneur will tell you that word of mouth and referrals are the backbone of their success.

When you put out a good product or service and stand behind your work, the advertising really does seem to take care of itself. I can’t count how many customers I gained in seven years of running my last business as referrals from current customers.

I can, however, count on one hand all the customers I gained through my paid advertising. It’s no contest.

Sure, I bent over backwards to run a killer service, even to the point of resisting homicide when a customer truly did deserve it. I might not have liked what I had to put up with to make them happy, and the problem might not have been entirely my fault, or even my fault at all, but the point is that it paid off.

Interestingly, some of my absolute worst customers, people who I could easily imagine being disgorged straight from the gates of hell, ended up being some of the most loyal of all my customers.

And all because rather than taking the money and calling it a day, I provided them not only with a great service, but the confidence that they could rely on that service to perform no matter what.

If they called me, the job got done.

Please Please Me

The old saying is true, you can’t please everyone. In spite of your best efforts there will be times when someone is going to have a problem with your product or services. Just accept it and keep an emergency pint or two handy. Whether these end up being minor blips on the radar or full blown meltdowns though is entirely under your control.

If there is one thing to practice consistently no matter what, it is to act the moment a customer problem arises.

By immediately addressing a customers’ complaint or a problem or mistake on your part, you are doing more much than just saving a sale.

You’re investing in the future of your business. Even when a problem is serious, there is nothing that will help you more than addressing the problem ASAP.

In some cases it’s possible that not only will you salvage your sale and reputation, but the customer will come away even more impressed with your services had the problem not occurred. A great product will make a customer feel good about their purchase.

Excellent service will make them feel confident in it as well and willing to buy more, even if there was a minor setback at the beginning. The true measure of a sales success isn’t just in how well your service or product performs, but also in how well it is supported.

Lemons Into Lemonade

As unpleasant as it may be to have to accept fault for a problem, the truly ambitious among us recognize that rather than being a stumbling block, a problem can very well represent nothing less than an opportunity to be taken advantage of.

If, however, your first inclination when receiving a complaint or request for support is to close your e-mail and begin looking up photo’s of Christina Hendricks, it might be time to reconsider how you’re doing business.

One thing is guaranteed here.

If you fail to handle the problem, and with haste, you will not be getting any repeat business from this customer and you certainly won’t be getting any referrals.

How important is word of mouth to you, and are you willing to do what it takes to keep those words friendly and sweet?

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Paul Novak is a freelance writer and content provider with a central focus on creating content for the web, and has over fifteen years of experience in creating unique and effective content. Paul also performs promotional and SEO oriented work, such as news releases and publishing of unique keyword articles to various outlets specifically geared towards improving your keyword article marketing and SEO efforts.
Visit Paul at WritingFourMyLife.com.

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