Here are a couple of quick examples of how two companies address the same customer happiness issue with two differing degrees of success. You’ll notice I say customer happiness rather than customer service. That’s because more often than not the service defines the happiness or lack thereof.
It rains here from time to time. As I’ve mentioned previously, we have a couple of newspapers delivered here at Rancho Deluxe each day. Rain and newspapers are fundamentally incompatible – just try to read one that’s been left out in the rain unprotected. Every once in a while, the delivery person doesn’t get the newspaper wrapped up too well and it’s wet. Not a big deal.
We’ve had a wet week and so each of the two newspapers – The NY Times and USA Today – has shown up wet. What happened next is the subject today. In the case of the Times, I went on their website where the link into account service is very clear and let them know we received a wet paper. I was given the option to get a credit or to have another paper delivered – potentially that same day. Three clicks and all done. The paper did show up followed by a telephone call from a human – not a robot – making sure I’d received it and the matter was resolved. Wow.
Compare that with yesterday’s experience with USA Today. First, they redesigned USA Today ‘s website and it is very pretty. Unfortunately, they’ve let “pretty” get ahead of “useful” and it took several minutes to get past the pretty pictures and actually locate the link into my account. At one point I hit the “subscribe” button (which is all the way down the page – I wonder how that link converts?) but I could do nothing on that page except subscribe. Oh wait – there’s a “chat with us” link available. Maybe they can help?
Nope. I gave them my name and email and told them I was a current subscriber. This was at 8:25 am. The autorespond said their reps were unavailable until 8 am in the same time zone I was in. Right – 25 minutes prior. Fail.
I won’t bore you with the details of how I finally got to the right page but when I did I clicked on “wet paper”. I was not given an option on how the issue would be resolved (I still don’t know). I was told it would be resolved within “1-2 business days” which is what the follow-up email said.
Two big companies, two very different responses to the same problem. With which company would you rather do business? More importantly which one is most like the way your business handles issues?
Consult Keith 