And the general point I'd like to illustrate is: It ain't customer service until the customer receives the service.
Case in point: I left Ikea in Milton Keynes today having handed over a bit more at the till than I had expected. Now, anyone who has wandered through an Ikea store will tell you this is not an unusual experience. By the time you've thrown a dozen or so items of small value alongside your main purchases, you're soon in the realms of 'guess the basket'. I am used to failing at this game. So when my bill rolled up at approximately £15 more than my ready-reckoning had reckoned, I thought little of it - paid up and headed home.
En route my lovely wife and I did a bit of mental totting up. No matter how many times we did this we still fell short of the total Ikea's happily chatting checkout staff had got to.
So when we pulled on to the drive at home, I rooted out the receipt and... sure enough, we'd been double charged for a picture frame.
No matter, I have the receipt - and it's full of very useful info. Including a number to call for this kind of eventuality. Yes it was a call centre and yes there were a number of robots to select options against between me and a conversation with a human (a couple too many for comfort) but when I finished the interminal option dance I got straight through to a very nice, friendly lady. In customer service.
And what she did was tell me that this was absolutely no problem, they had a record of the transaction, they could see the error, they'd refund my card. One small snag... she couldn't actually refund the card herself. That's down to the store. Who she would alert. And they'd call me back. This afternoon.
They never did.
And there-in lies the problem. Ikea's customer service is just more marcomms unless it can actually deliver the service the customer needs. And it can't. So it's a misnomer.
Customer Service, it appears, is actually DONE (rather than talked about) in store.
And the bottom line is this: no matter how charming the people you call your 'customer service' team, no matter how professionally and courteously they deal with the customer's call, they are just another marcomms lie unless they have 100% back up from the do-ers - the deliverers of their promises.
The distance between what you say you will do and what you actually do, is a lie.
Harsh? Perhaps but for those on the receiving end of this mismatch, it's painfully true
UPDATE: Aug 7, 2010.
I had to call them back today - having not heard from Ikea to refund the money they had taken from me. This time they told me it 'takes 12 working hours'. When I probed further it turned out they would be reviewing CCTV evidence before giving me the money they have misappropriated from me. And that wouldn't happen today. I may get a call on Monday at the earliest. I told them in future I would be going v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y through their checkouts. And I advise everyone else so to do.
The initial pretence of trusing the customer was clearly a sham - a pretence - a lie. Marcomms at its very worst.
Now I'm not only out of pocket - I am angry about the misinformation and misdirection.
Ikea, not only is your customer service a misnomer, it's clear you actually don't trust your customers. Well, in at least one case, that feeling is now entirely mutual.
Thank you for your post, which I very much enjoyed. I have for a while documented the trials and tribulations of being a customer in the following post http://www.liriandersson.com/?p=1045 where I look at it from the perspective of how organisations are not built around the customer.
ReplyDeleteHowever, looking at it, like you do, from the perspective of a gap between comms and actual service is an interesting angle.
Why do so many companies get that bit wrong? I believe it is because they do not factor in that we are dealing with the human element. And the human element is hard to control. No matter how many ‘rules’ you create around customer service that employees are meant to follow, they will not materialise, at least not in a consistent fashion, if these ‘rules’ are not backed up with systems and processes to ensure their execution. With this I mean customer service being part of how each individual in an organisation is measured and rewarded, it being ingrained in the corporate culture (affecting both training and recruitment and ‘the way we do things around her’), the right technology put in place in order for staff to be aware of issues and solve them efficiently and in a timely manner…I could go on.
But customer service is, unfortunately, often the creation of a marketing department, were it becomes the basis for the next advertising campaign, with little to back it up from an organisational perspective. A shame because customer service is no longer just a tool to be competitive, it is rapidly becoming a must have. (and so it should be!)
I shall follow your post from now on, and again, thanks!
I absolutely agree! And I'll tell you, the more robots you put between us and an actual person, the more frustrated and less likely we are to be satisfied by the time we actually talk to a person. If I went through five minutes of selecting numeric options and then five minutes of hold time, I expect someone to move mountains by the time I talk to a real person. Same goes for the amount of associates at a store that you have to talk to before you actually get to the manager who can do something for you. Great post! God bless!
ReplyDeleteAnother great article. I like that you are very honest and direct to the point.
ReplyDeleteWell, you'll be pleased to hear they called up on Monday afternoon to give me my money back. There may have been an apology - but you know what? I don't think there was. Like I say folks - go very s-l-o-w-l-y through their checkouts. Place as much trust in them as they do in you :-(
ReplyDeleteNice post! I agree that' "It ain't customer service until the customer receives the service." Customers do not expect perfection, however, they do require a sincere and consistent effort on their behalf.
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I really enjoy reading your post. really nice and useful blog for all us. thanks again
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