Topic: Customer service, how do you cope ? (Read 641 times)

Hi! To be honest, I have never worked with some customer services. What are the advantages of using such services? I worked only with the Starting a Business in Singapore service, and I should say that it was an amazing experience of work with professionals

I'm sure some of you have experience with customer service, some of you as a customer, some as a customer rep, and some in both roles.

It's understandable that it's the people with the least amount of knowledge that's often put in the first line at customer support.


What's doing my head in generally, when speaking to customer support is the following:

1. Customer support doesn't answer or takes a long time to answer.
2. Customer support doesn't actually read the support ticket, or reads it and doesn't care and just copypaste some useless answer.
3. Customer support ignores most of the issues you're asking about, say you ask 8 specific questions, and then they just adress 1 or 2, and claim to forward the other questions to the 'relevant' departments, but you never receive an answer.
4. Customer support that licks your back when you have them on the phone. "Yes, Sir, I will personally assure that this case is taken care of ASAP. I will push our partners to provde a timely answer for you", then one week later you get in touch, and the representative that promised to take care of the issue is either on vacation or forgot about the whole thing.
5. Customer support that just pushes cases around, but never actually tries to solve them.
6. Customer support that ask you for details you've already provided. For this reason I try to recap a situation in every mail I send, to make sure the whole story is not lost.

I think the following rules would be good to follow:

1. Try to help the customer as good as you can. If it's outside your field of knowledge, refer the case to someone that has the required knowhow, or at least ask those to provide the customer with accurate information.

2. Be honest. Don't lie to the customer. Customers will find out. The customer rep who said on the phone: "We can't see a problem on your line Sir, we have contact with your cable modem", and then the guy calling customer service smirkingly holding up the disconnected wire at the same time.

3. Do what you promise. If you promise to call the customer back, or promise to fix something for the customer, this is what you do, even if it means working 30 mins of overtime at the end of the day, calling the customer appologizing for not coming back to him, but that you will be on the case the next day.


The biggest grieveances is when you have to transfer some amount of money and the company you're dealing with is dead slow, or when you have technical questions, and these are simply never answered, even though it would be extremely helpful if they were.

I read somewhere that companies providing poor customer service is losing a lot of goodwill and money.




I'm not US based, but I think similar numbers would be true in other countries.


What I personally do when e-mail support is not up to par is to call, which sometimes lead to better results, I'm also nagging at times, because a big company that doesn't answer within 24 hours, for something that's actually important for my company, then I'm flat out losing money, and I don't like it.

So what are your methods to get the best possible customer service ?

When I'm dealing with large companies, and I get some dumb customer rep on the phone, I usually just excuse myself and hang up, and call again and talk to someone else. Some people should never work with customer support at all.

The way I see it, when I have a question, I want it answered, and I want it answered in a timely manner. Simple as that.

I notice it sometimes helps to use a 'title' to get the attention and the issue escalated.

What do you all think, do you have some interesting customer support histories, and how you had them solved ?