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The $4 Million Complaint Call

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Re: The $4 Million Complaint Call

#71

Post by lifeisstillgood »

patio11 wrote: post #66

I paid for college working as an Order Entry operator for a division large office supplies store (you know, the kind of place where you go when you want to buy paper and... staples). We got a memo from the CEO every couple of months. I can quote the most memorable one in it's entirety: [Grainy photograph of photocopied email with effusive praise from the Purchasing Director at a Midwestern life insurance company, whi…

Isn't it likely that is the only order that CEO ever made personally? And he happened to catch Cindy on good day?

My only takeaway from this is if you want orders to be taken from CEOs by pleasent happy people, hire pleasant, happy people to work for you.

Is that what you meant?

Re: The $4 Million Complaint Call

#72

Post by patio11 »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #71
patio11 wrote: post #66

I paid for college working as an Order Entry operator for a division large office supplies store (you know, the kind of place where you go when you want to buy paper and... staples). We got a memo from the CEO every couple of months. I can quote the most memorable one in it's entirety: [Grainy photograph of photocopied email with effusive praise from the Purchasing Director at a Midwestern life insurance company, whi…

Isn't it likely that is the only order that CEO ever made personally? And he happened to catch Cindy on good day? My only takeaway from this is if you want orders to be taken from CEOs by pleasent happy people, hire pleasant, happy people to work for you. Is that what you meant?

Sorry, wasn't clear, let me elaborate: prior to the Director of Purchasing at $CUSTOMER deciding to award $COMPANY a $300,000 a year account, Bob Smith (who happens to be DoP at $CUSTOMER when not doting on his daughter) was in a bind with regards to shipping time frames on birthday balloons, and Cindy (a lovely lady who makes $10.50 an hour and whose good days were best described as "the ones ending in Y") overrode the computer's heuristics for shipping methods, shipped $25 of balloons in a $50 envelope, and called the warehouse personally to make sure it ended up on the very last van for delivery in time for the birthday the following day.

Working in seasonal order entry is a very cruddy job, by the way, but I'll give it to $COMPANY: they genuinely believed and practiced all the words that everyone repeats about customer satisfaction.

Re: The $4 Million Complaint Call

#73

Post by drewcrawford »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #20
rohansingh wrote: post #5

This is effectively gambling with your time. You only have a limited amount of time available each day. The minutes or hours you spend on the phone with a single customer, walking them through things like how to install Windows, are minutes or hours you are not using to build things that could reach all of your customers. You could luck out, and that time you spent with a single customer could end up like this, with…

Interesting take on it, which I disagree with. This isn't "gambling with your time" this is "making good on your customer's commitment". And your note triggered a really interesting visceral reaction in me. You can look at life as a series of choices you make and a scoring system by which you evaluate the quality of those choices. Typically a positive scoring system is used so the higher the score the 'better' the de…

> if you're committed to your company and your company's success, then you decide to do what ever it takes to solve your customer's problems.

> Anytime you spend extra time with your customer you win.

I don't think that anyone actually adopts this position. You would probably not become a kidney donor for your customer, or pay them $10,000 because they confess to you in a support call that they recently became unemployed. You would not build a new software application just for them. You would not even add a feature to the product just for one customer! (At least at the consumer software level.)

It's fine to make exaggerated statements because our society requires exaggerated change. But there is a big difference between saying that Time Warner, AT&T, et. al., need to get better about customer service, vs saying that patio11 or Peldi do.

I guess the fundamental problem I have with your position is that you are preaching a message that lots of people in Fortune 500s should hear (and won't), to a group of people that are probably treating their customers too well already, and are perhaps feeling guilty that they do not do even more for them, and are thus primed to further the error. So in that specific sense, I think this advice is dangerous.

A much better approach would be to advocate a scoring system that takes into account more of the actual benefit of customer service, e.g. realistically estimating the marketing benefits, considering the product feedback benefits, and so on. The value of customer support may vary greatly with the kind of market you are in, for example.

Re: The $4 Million Complaint Call

#74

Post by davidw »

Blunt wrote: post #46
seigenblues wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is dead on. It's a mistake to read this and take away some homey homily about how "every customer is a snowflake!" -- the point is that you should correctly value the passionate customer. Your marketing and outreach and customer service departments should understand the relative values of "bought it, loved it!" and "bought it, so?" Those relative values will vary from product to product/industry to industry The…

ya know, I just don't agree with anyone who posts here and uses the word "customer." Yea, Bob was a customer but he is also a human being. Less we forget this and remember we are working with other people then you don't need to worry about "snowflakes" or whether you're customers are happy or not. Just treat everyone you come in contact with with respect & regardless of how you met (business or otherwise) and this wo…

The thing is though, he went well beyond 'respect', and really went out of his way to help the guy. That's very nice, but doing that for everyone, all the time simply may not be feasible.

It's a question of economics: you simply can't bend over backwards for all customers, in all lines of business, without going bust. Silly example: if I walk into a hardware store and buy a nail, and then proceed to waste an hour of the salesperson's time, that's a loss to them. Perhaps they'll make it back if I come back again and again and buy other things, but it's something that each business has to determine.

Re: The $4 Million Complaint Call

#75

Post by cheatercheater »

TLDR: Yet another story about how someone lucked out, and therefore you should follow their flawed approach, because they think the chance to luck out like they did is 100%, whereas in fact it is 0.00001%.

The blog poster's dream world: we have randomly lucked out by having a single annoying customer who we stuck with against better judgement, and the frog turned out to be the prince six months after we cupped its balls on a Sunday at 2 am.

In reality: if you spend your time indulging annoying customers there's a 99.9999999% chance they'll just keep being annoying customers. You will piss off everyone at your company for indulging in the annoying customers' ridiculous requests, and if you're on my support team I will fire you, because you have better things to do, such as supporting people that respect the privacy of people they do not know.

If Bob called me at 2 am, there's a non-zero probability the outcome would be him having a lot of bad words to spread about me. You know what? It's probably worth it, because I don't want good word of mouth spread by people clueless enough to call me at 2 in the morning. My experience here? In over a decade of working freelance, therefore needing a new job every several weeks, I've never had bad word of mouth stop me from getting a job. And I have had to shut down a lot of Bobs, quite often in a fiery fireball of very, very satisfying fury. In retrospect, most Bobs have never amounted to much at all, and I often wonder why I hadn't cut them off much earlier. Think Bob would have stood up in that meeting, and said, "oh yeah, totally go with those guys you plan to, because that one company you're not thinking of using wouldn't speak to me at 2 am"?

Re: The $4 Million Complaint Call

#76

Post by cheatercheater »

cldrope wrote: post #59
Blunt wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ya know, I just don't agree with anyone who posts here and uses the word "customer." Yea, Bob was a customer but he is also a human being. Less we forget this and remember we are working with other people then you don't need to worry about "snowflakes" or whether you're customers are happy or not. Just treat everyone you come in contact with with respect & regardless of how you met (business or otherwise) and this wo…

Thank you for using the word human. I'm all about the "Don't kiss others' booties on the off chance that it will come back to you" because if you're doing it for that reason, you're doing it wrong. Just treat people well, take everything one step at a time, and look at it from their vantage point. These things in mind and everyone will walk away from the table happy the majority of the time. If your customer service…

> Just treat people well, take everything one step at a time

You can only take so many steps each day. Forfeit too many steps for some guy who won't pay off and you lose out.

Re: The $4 Million Complaint Call

#77

Post by dalke »

Mz wrote: post #14

I love stories like this. A couple of others that come to mind with a similar theme: A bank was going to turn down an account for some long-haired young man in jeans who wanted his statements forwarded all over the place. Then some young employee told the middle-aged manager he was a wealthy rock star who needed his bank statements available while touring. Some young bank teller with an attitude was being an ass to a…

The rock star one doesn't make sense. Why didn't the bank look at the account to see that he was rich? My bank, for example, once gave me different treatment when they realized I also had a business account with them. There's also the story I heard attributed to Bob Miner of Oracle (see http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/09/oracle.html ). In the version I heard, once the bank learned he was now very wealthy, they let him know he now had a personal banker.

Also, getting a bookkeeper to handle this sort of thing (including bill payments) is trivial, and scheduling a flurry of different addresses which depend on when the statements are mailed, the efficiency of the postal system, and various tour dates seems very shaky.

Re: The $4 Million Complaint Call

#78

Post by dalke »

dsirijus wrote: post #45

Only slightly flammable honest question: If it was so lucrative to take calls at 2AM, why don't they offer that kind of service after anymore? http://support.bsiusa.com/ :{-

My guess is that they've improved their training support, like with the "remote control software" option under Platinum Tech Care Plan. Early on it's cheaper to provide phone support to a small number of customers then it is to set up a comprehensive training program.

Re: The $4 Million Complaint Call

#80

Post by yardie »

davidw wrote: post #74
Blunt wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ya know, I just don't agree with anyone who posts here and uses the word "customer." Yea, Bob was a customer but he is also a human being. Less we forget this and remember we are working with other people then you don't need to worry about "snowflakes" or whether you're customers are happy or not. Just treat everyone you come in contact with with respect & regardless of how you met (business or otherwise) and this wo…

The thing is though, he went well beyond 'respect', and really went out of his way to help the guy. That's very nice, but doing that for everyone, all the time simply may not be feasible. It's a question of economics: you simply can't bend over backwards for all customers, in all lines of business, without going bust. Silly example: if I walk into a hardware store and buy a nail, and then proceed to waste an hour of…

Funny, when I was a student and worked at a hardware store that was almost the exact example they gave as encouragement. You want the customer to trust you and the store and so most of the time their projects start with a box of nails. Do they need the tinpenny, concrete, roofing, anchor nails, or tacks? Most people who know what nails they need don't bother you. But the guy/girl starting on their first renovation or garden are practically begging you to take their money. Personally, when I step foot into a hardware store it's a given that I'm leaving with $100 worth of stuff.

Now a better example would be consumer electronics. It's expensive, most people don't know what they really want they read some review in engadget, and the margins on the name brand stuff is extremely low ($5-10, on Sony TVs for example).

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