Service Untitled

I found myself citing one of my favorite customer service quotes at least once a week. The quote is “the road to success is paved with well handled mistakes” and I think it summarizes and important aspect of customer service.

I recently sent a complaint letter to a Fortune 500 company I had a problem with not that long ago. I just sent the letter yesterday so I’m not expecting to hear back anytime soon, but their response will show a lot about how they think of their customers and their customer service. If a company gets a complaint letter and dismisses it, that doesn’t reflect well upon the company. If they respond to it and make an effort to make a bad situation right, it tends to show they are committed to customer satisfaction.

When you get a complaint letter, how do you handle it? The companies that handle complaints really well seem to have some sort of formal process. They have someone empowered to handle and respond to complaints. The person has good customer service skills and gets in touch with customers and helps them with what they need. This helps add some accountability to the process and lets customers know that someone at the company cares about them.

There is data out there that says that a well handled mistake actually results in a happier customer than if nothing went wrong in the first place. Essentially, the act of the company making a bad situation right improves that customer’s overall satisfaction. That’s the power of making a bad situation right.

Working with angry customers is a part of customer service that can’t be avoided. I write about working with angry customers fairly regularly and have a category devoted to it, but it is still a challenge to work with angry customers. A reader named Nancy emailed me today expressing the frustration she feels when she works with extremely angry customers who just won’t let her talk. Her frustration is certainly called for and it is a common one at that.

Out of all the challenges in customer service, working with customers who scream, yell, and curse is probably the biggest challenge. Most companies don’t tolerate the worst of these customers (they hang up), but what about the customer who is just really angry and isn’t necessarily doing anything wrong? How do you work with that customer?

Back in December 2007, I featured a two part guest post from Jennifer Harris, an employee at Ruby Receptionists. Her (great) advice is as follows:

• Lower your voice. This will force the customer to lower his or her voice to hear you.
• Provide a plan of action. Let the customer know what you can do and make it clear if you are doing anything special or going out of your way for that customer.

These are two great tips. I also find it useful to apologize to customers about the inconvenience and tell them that you are going to work with them to get their issues resolved. Ask them what they would like to happen to get the issue resolved (this works really well when customers are going on and on; simply ask, “Okay, what would you like us to do to get this issue resolved for you?” and go from there).

It’s unfortunate, but sometimes you just have to talk while an angry customer is talking. If you lower your voice, you will usually be able to gain some control over the conversation. Once you have the customer listening, use your best active listening skills and positive language to come to a solution.

In almost all companies, angry customers are a fact of customer service life. It is important to not take the customer’s anger personally (it isn’t directed towards you specifically) and to do whatever you can to get the issue resolved. Even though some customers can’t be pleased, it is possible to work with a majority of customers who can start off angry and end up satisfied.

Twitter has gotten really good at responding to issues. As a rapidly growing, high profile startup, they seem to have some sort of issue they need to address publicly every few months or so.

The last major response that I blogged about was back in June when Twitter was responding to criticism surrounding their less than perfect uptime and reliability. Yesterday, Twitter responded publicly in regards to 33 high-profile Twitter accounts being “hacked”.

Admitting that some of your highest profile users (including the future president!) have had their accounts compromised is no easy task. It is something the company realized they had to approach quickly and correctly, especially given the high profile nature of the company and the accounts that were compromised. Tens of thousands of people probably saw it happen, so Twitter had to respond. Responding quickly and publicly was the first thing Twitter did right.

Twitter did another thing right by responding with a terrific blog post. They provided a concise explanation of what happened (why and how the accounts were compromised, when they noticed it, and what they did) followed by an explanation of what they did to fix the immediate problem and what they are doing in the future. Additionally, they answered a question they were sure was going to be asked about the possibility of another technology preventing the sort of problem that occurred (it wouldn’t help, but they addressed the question regardless).

In less than 400 words, Twitter provided an excellent response that probably went a long way with most of the people who read it. When something happens that you know people will notice, make it a point to respond publicly. Do so quickly and sincerely. Let people know that you have addressed the immediate problem and that you’re working on making sure it doesn’t happen again and won’t affect them (again).

If you do make it a point to admit and then respond, your customers are likely going to respect your honesty and value your company’s transparency.

Thanks to Dan from Shoeboxed for sending me the link to the article earlier today.

I’ve said plenty of good things about Chick-fil-A in the past, which was why I was surprised when I had a negative experience with one of the fast food company’s franchises last week.

The experience actually started as a positive experience. I had been mailed a page of coupons from Chick-fil-A. A few them appealed to me and I knew I went to the Chick-fil-A near me every so often, so I kept one for a free milkshake in my wallet. When I went to the Chick-fil-A near me the following week, I used the coupon and got my free chocolate milkshake. The woman who helped me then handed me a very similar coupon that also said “free handspun milkshake with any lunch or dinner meal.” Simple enough – I put the new (identical) coupon in my wallet.

The following week, I was back at Chick-fil-A and tried to order the milkshake and was told I had to get a peppermint milkshake because “that was what the coupon was promoting.” I asked the person to show me where it said I had to order a peppermint milkshake (the only criteria I could see was “handspun,” which they all are) and was again told that the picture of the peppermint milkshake on the front negated what the text said. The “fine print” only covered copyright issues, not issues relating to the promotion. I told the person that I had used successfully a similar coupon with the same picture on the front the week before and received no response.

In no mood to argue at length over a free milkshake, I took my peppermint milkshake and a comment card and left. I called the number on the comment card and got the local store’s answering machine. I left a message explaining the situation and my contact information. A week later, I still haven’t heard a word from Chick-fil-A, which is almost as annoying as having an advertisement that misrepresents what you can actually get.

What surprised me most, though, was Chick-fil-A unwillingness to give me the benefit of the doubt, even after I explained I had used the same coupon a week earlier. The cost of the milkshakes is probably the same and would have avoided the issue all together.

Good customer service companies give customers that “misunderstand” a policy the benefit of the doubt. I had a similar experience with Amazon.com over a year ago in the past, but unlike Chick-fil-a, they decided to give me the benefit of the doubt (even though the policy was clearly spelled out on Amazon’s web site).

When a customer is really upset, it really helps when a manager or other supervisor takes a few minutes to reach out to that customer. The manager can give the upset customer a call or send them a personal email – just something to let them know what they heard about the issue and offer their assistance.

Just like the representative that only needs to take a few minutes a day to reach out, this is all about taking the extra time to work with customers who have expressed they are frustrated. They may not being posting about the issue publicly (yet), but they are upset and they are frustrated. If a manager who is empowered to make things happens can get in touch with them, it can make a big difference. Instead of a negative post the next day, they might post something overwhelmingly positive.

The upset customers tend to appreciate simple gestures like a manager reaching out because they are relatively uncommon. The only time customers usually talk to managers is when they are extremely persisent and refuse to get off the phone without talking to a manager. Imagine how impressed a customer would be if he or she received a call or an email from a manager or a supervisor that started off with a statement like “I heard that you were frustrated with your resolution from our customer service department the other day. How may I help you?” Chances are, they would be grateful for the manager reaching out and happy to hear from someone.
The best call centers make this a normal practice. In the best call centers, managers and supervisors are easily available and regularly talk to customers. And it helps. If customer service representatives are able to resolve most of the issues, they really don’t have to elevate calls very often. However, chances are that every representative will have to escalate a call sooner or later and having managers that care and that are available make the process a lot more effective.

When a customer calls reporting or complaining about an outage, service interruption, or anything similar, my advice to customer service representatives is simple: give lots of details. From my experience, the more details the customers get, the better.

Customers like to hear what’s going on – even if it’s bad news. They would much rather hear honest updates than the stock response of “we have no additional information” or the even worse stock response of “we’re investigating.”

They really like to hear what you’re doing to fix the problem, too.If you can tell a particular customer three or four things that have been done in the last 15 or 20 minutes to help resolve the problem, they’ll appreciate it. Of course, you also need to keep employees in the loop in order for customers to be kept in the loop.

While you tell the customer about these updates, you want to tell them that an end is in sight (hopefully you know the general timeline of when a fix will happen) and that you apologize for the inconvenience. If possible, back that apology up with something like a service credit.

Studies have shown that customers who experience an outage or some sort of negative experience that is well handled by the company actually end up more loyal than before. In other words, if you mess up (which everyone inevitably does) and handle it well, it won’t hurt you. In fact, it could actually make the affected customers even more loyal.

One of my favorite quotes is “the road to success is paved with well handled mistakes” (see this post for more). How you handle your mistakes is just as (if not more) important as working towards not making them in the first place.

Technorati Tags: Outages, Angry Customers, Updates

Twitter is the poster child of Web 2.0. It’s pretty hip, it’s innovative, it’s grown exponentially, and despite having no clear business model, is considered to be extremely successful. I don’t use Twitter personally, but I know plenty of people that do, and most of them like the service a lot. One of the biggest criticisms of the product, though, is that its reliability is shaky at best.

Critics and the company itself have blamed the relibality issues on different things. Some say its because the site uses Ruby (a programming framework), others say it is because the site’s infastructure isn’t well designed, and others just say the site has been growing too fast for any team to keep up with. All of the issues have their respective truths, but what is more interesting to me as a customer service person is how they’ve responded and handled their issues of downtime.

The word is that Twitter used to be okay at best when it came to responding to feedback and criticism. However, the company has recently gotten a lot better. They’ve gotten so good that journalists and users have been openly applauding the company for being so responsive. Even, the often negative TechCrunch said in a recent post that Twitter “continues to be annoyingly and constructively responsive to criticism.”

If you read Twitter’s response to TechCrunch’s questions, the commentary makes sense; Twitter has been very responsive and they’ve been doing a great job at it.

First of all, Twitter admits their faults and says positive changes are coming soon. By saying “we know it is not correct and we’re changing that,” and explaining how they are changing that (by bringing on quite a experienced engineers to their team), they’re covering a major issue right there. Once they address those important issues, they answer TechCrunch’s specific questions with pretty good answers. They don’t get too technical (they got a little more technical in another post), but they do answer the questions and address how they’re going to move forward.

Twitter also has a status web site that shows the company is serious about their uptime as well as about being open and transparent. The status page contains updates and useful links (including a link to a third-party uptime monitoring service). It is just an additional level of transparency that makes the company seem even more open and responsive to downtime.

Twitter has done a great job at responding to feedback and keeping a positive image. A lot of companies can learn a lot from Twitter’s actions when dealing with these issues.

Technorati Tags: Communication, Customer Service, Outage, Twitter

The web hosting industry is a tough industry. There an infinite number of potential technical problems that can occur, ruthless competition, somewhat low margins, and then to top it off, trucks and explosions.

San Antonio, Texas-based Rackspace dealt with a truck knocking its power out (and subsequently quite a few servers). Most recently, though, The Planet (another large dedicated hosting company and an indirect competitor of Rackspace), had a portion of their datacenter explode.

The cause of The Planet’s issues are fairly simple: an electrical system shorted and caught on fire. The fire caused an explosion that “knocked down three walls” that surrounded the datanceter’s electrical equipment room. The power for most of the datacenter then went out. The fire department, after inspection the damage, told The Planet that they were not allowed to turn on their backup generators for safety concerns. 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers were affected. Needless to say, it was a large outage.

The company started responding and posting updates almost immediately on their forums. The first significant update came about four hours after the incident was first mentioned. An hour after the incident was first reported, employees promised to post updates every 15 minutes on the forums (a promise they kept for the most part).

Something The Planet did really well was keep up with the updates. Even if they had to post “there are no additional updates at this time,” they still kept their customers in the loop. The company then developed a plan of action and reminded customers that they fully intended to keep to their SLA promises and commitments. As it got later into the night, the company started posting updates less frequently, but they never stopped posting updates. They brought in additional teams and support technicians to help fix the problems and man the phones. 28 hours after the issue first occurred, the company’s CEO posted an update on the forums that briefly and effectively communicated what was going on and what was going to happen.

I really liked how The Planet communicated their priorities (restoring service) very clearly. I also like how they provided updates every 15 minutes while they were learning about the issue and what it meant for customers. Their temporary web site was effective at providing updates as well.

While still keeping what they did do well in mind, The Planet also did some things I did not particularly care for. Posting about sales and promotions while a good portion of a large datacenter is down is inappropriate. That has the potential to annoy a lot of customers and I’m sure the company can afford to hold off for a day or two on the promotions. The company’s official blog has yet to mention the outage. Their web site doesn’t talk about it, either. More importantly, neither of them mentioned the outage while it was still happening (all services were fully restored as of a few hours ago).

Overall, the company handled the issue well. What The Planet does over the next few days will determine what a lot of customers and a lot of the web hosting industry thinks of the company.

Technorati Tags: Communication, Customer Service, Outage, Updates, Rackspace, The Planet