Top 7 Customer Service Blunders

Customers are Gods. This is the fundamental rule that any business owner teaches his employees. After all, it’s the customer that you have to satisfy in order to make your business flourish. However good your product maybe, if you don’t have the support and goodwill of your customers, you’re bound to be a loser. But some companies after reaching a high level of success lose their focus on customer satisfaction. The reasons are plenty ranging from over-confidence, bad management, corrupt practices etc. That is when they start falling. Here are some situations that seem to be a common occurrence with many customers.

“We packed the wrong commodity, that’s not our fault ma’m”

At a leading shoe retail outlet, I finalize a pair of red stilettos from a leading footwear manufacturing company and hand them over to the customer service rep for packing. After going home, to my dismay I find a pair of baby shoes in my pack! I take them to the shop immediately, and ask for a change, but they say that once the transaction is done, the deal is closed and they can do nothing about it. I approach the stiletto company and tell them the incident, but ah! They are too busy to have any time for looking into trivial transactions. So here I am with my pair of newly bought baby shoes adorning my showcase. Where else can I put a pair of shoes that are of no use to me?

I do agree that these days, customer service in general has improved a lot and retailers do accept the goods if there’s any complaint ,but there are quite a few of the above mentioned incidents happening with minor modifications here and there. Even if the sellers agree to listen to your complaint, they’ll grant your wish only after a lot of procrastination and harassment which you’ve got to take in patiently. Well, do you think I’m going to go back to that store again for my next buy? Definitely not! And yes, even if I don’t tell my experience, there are so many others like me who’ll spread word about their bad experiences with your company and retail store. So if you are prepared to lose a bunch of customers, please continue with your unjust customer service practices.

“We don’t deliver what we promise, not our fault”

Don’t get duped by classy hoardings and newspaper classified advertisements. Many a time, I had nasty experiences with them. Of the many experiences, I can speak about one that happened recently. I saw a classified advertisement about a work at home business opportunity-the ones that housewives take up in their spare time. One classified read “Make $100 a day, without any investment”. Excited by the prospect of doing a business in my spare time I called up the advertiser. He refused to divulge the details and asked me to attend a seminar about the business, which though inconvenient for me, I attended.  In the course of the seminar what I realized was that, though there was no formal investment, I had to buy the products for doing the business and had to pay a huge registration fee to enroll myself. Apart from that, there were so many hidden expenditures involved and the $ 100 a day earning seemed to be beyond the ability of most housewives. It was a sales job and only women who could spend some 10-12 hours a day, trying to sell products could meet that target. Disgusted beyond imagination, I left the seminar in a huff.

Clever marketing and baiting in customers is a good marketing tactic but don’t promise things that you don’t mean. It might work once or twice but not always.

“We can do anything with customer money, customers are lambs”

I have known of a real estate scandal that happened with quite a few people I’m acquainted with including me. There was this Mr. Broker who promised to arrange for housing plots at subsidized rates. He took money for the purpose as commission which all of us agree as fair enough. He promised to materialize the project in 3 months time. But even after 6 months there was no progress. He would tell us that due to recession the real estate market was bad due to which the builders did not want to start the project. Fair enough! After waiting for three more months some of us wanted to withdraw from the project and asked the broker to return the money. But to our dismay, the broker said that he did not have our money with him as he had invested it in another project. Even though we waited for a few more months for him to clear our dues, he kept evading with new excuses. Finally we thought of filing a case against him. How can people be so irresponsible with other people’s money?

“Erroneous credit card billing due to technical defects”

Erroneous credit card billings due to technical faults are a common occurrence now. If you’ve been following news headlines, you must have come across a classic example of this on the 16th of July, this year. Josh Muszynski paid a bill of $23,148,855,308,184,500.00. for a pack of cigarettes ! Jon Seale also got such a dizzy figure as a credit card bill for a mere pizza bite!  The problem was with Visa Debit processing system. Of course, Visa corrected the amount that these two gentlemen actually had to pay.

Well, I think since it was a bizarre figure for trivial products, people could catch the error. But if it would have been a small deviation nobody could have detected it. For example, instead of $80 you get a bill of $180, you will not even come to know.

“We serve you condom soup”

This will send you into peels of laughter!  Recently, you must have heard about a man filing a lawsuit against Claim Jumper on finding a rubber in his soup. Read about it here. First the company shamelessly ‘serves’ a condom in the soup and then fights against a lawsuit filed by the customer with some points which are not convincing enough. Now they say that the allegations made by the customer about wrongdoings in the joint are not evidenced. Well, that may be true. But why make such an indecent service at all, in the first place? The quality check team should be given the boot!

“If you use your cellphone as a modem, we’re going to charge you very high!”

That’s fair enough! But always be clear about the charges. You must have heard about this young man Poitr Staniaszek who got a bill of $ 85,000 for using his mobile as a modem for downloading media files. If you haven’t, read it here. I don’t blame the Canadian boy for trying to utilize his $10 unlimited browsing facility that his service provider, Bell Mobility, has given him. The mobile cell company should have made its usage terms and conditions clear to its customers. Also, when the bill was rising up to $85, 000 nobody from the company even bothered to notify the user. Were they coolly waiting for the bill to rise to its maximum so that they could charge a fortune from their customer?

“We won’t refund your money… till you file a compliant with BBB”

An unnamed woman paid a fitness center $ 5620 as fee for training through electronic transfer. She wanted a refund, but the management seems to have refused the refund on the grounds that she had agreed to pay the fee for the program and even though she did not use the program, she would not get her refund. After battling with them for 3 years she filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau and got her refund. Read the story on Consumerist.

Lesson to be learnt by companies here is that don’t try to act ‘smart’ with your customers because they can always approach higher authorities for justice.

At the end, I’d say that better customer service and empathy for their problems is what is going to win you the good will of customers. Customers are not short of choices, if you don’t give them satisfaction, someone else will.