Many great technological feats have been destroyed by lousy customer service.

It does not matter how fast your web site is, how many transactions per hour it can handle or how many different items you sell, cross-sell, or up-sell. If the customers are having terrible experiences with your customer service people, your enterprise is doomed.

Let me give you a recent example I experienced with a bank card site. The bank card already had two strikes against it because it was frequently down and always asked to me to re-enroll because it could not handle/find/verify my existing login.

That should have warned me about the dangers of relying on the customer service behind this site. Bad web sites usually have even worse customer service. In this case it wasn't just customer "no-service", as Clark Howard puts it, it was customer "abusive service". My wife and I were called liars, the customer service representatives misrepresented their own capabilities, those of the site, legal considerations of electronic payments and a whole range of customer etiquette issues.

The end result is that we ended up canceling that card and, of course, never used that web site again.

Let's examine what that company lost as a result. Estimated fees and interest charges this bank card service will lose yearly from the loss of our patronage: about $210. Loss from all the people we tell not to use the the card in question...yet to be determined. However, when enough people have had bad service from this company, it will go under, no matter if they fix their web site or not. [Update: this rewards card did indeed die off. The company tried to restart it with a new program but that, too was unsuccesful.] Why spend millions on a brand if you won't spend any money supporting the customers? Even on a connected planet with 8 billion people, there are a limited number of consumers you can run through before the non-returning customers affect your bottom line.

In this case, senior management poured tens of millions into the web site and card advertising. And they lost a loyal customer for the princely sum of $122—what we were charged when their web site errantly used the wrong bank account to process a payment. Not to mention the approximately $210 per year they will lose for the privilege of us using their credit card. Hmmm, what's the ROI on a thousands of dollars over a few years versus $332? Then mulitply that by the number of customers who experienced similar customer service failures through this web site.

Is your customer service department driving people away? Test them! Call them up yourself with a problem and see if a) they can help you and b) whether they are empowered (and willing) to accommodate long-time customers with a $100-200 concession for a problem that stemmed from the use of your web site or service. I'm betting that even if (a) is true, (b) is not.

Need examples of a company doing it right? Just look at companies that have thrived over the past 20-30 years, even with swings in the economy and changes in technology: Amazon, Apple, and Netflix. These companies have given their customers what they want and have enabled customer service through the web. Amazon, for exmaple, handles the vast majority of their customer service issues through its website. An online chat service is available if you need to "speak" to someone (which also masks a foreign-language call center issue) and arrange for returns, order cancellations, etc. through the website. That means a customer can get their issues resolved at 2 A.M. if they wish. What are your customer service hours?

I'm sure you have your own customer service horror stories. The fact that almost everyone does shows how far companies have to go in this area. Even companies that are doing it right (for the most part) can drop the ball every now and then. Check out one loyal Apple customer who experienced horrible customer service which led them to explore alternatives to Apple products. How much will that cost Apple in the future?

Improve Your Customer Service

Things you can do to improve your customer service:

• Your customer service department should be informed about your web site.: what is on it, how to use it and what kind of questions to expect from users. Nothing is more frustrating to customers than realizing that they know your systems better than your support people do.
• Empower customer service to make concessions of money or other items to customers. The longer they have been customers the more leeway they should get. Long-time customers are like gold to a company. You spend very little to retain them, and long-ago recouped the investment it took to attract them in the first place. Don't throw that away for $100-200 in concessions!
• Track complaints and send updates to the people who made them. You can win back customers who swore off your company when they see that you did indeed fix the problem that drove them away.
• Budget a good percentage of money for customer support compared to what you spend for supporting marketing call centers and advertising. If you are spending $10 in marketing call centers for every $1 in customer support call centers/websites you are wasting your marketing efforts. Think about stores that spend huge sums advertising a sale only to forget to stock enough items. Money spent on marketing is wasted if it doesn't generate satisfied customers. Customers who feel they have been treated wrongly speak out to their friends three times as often as those who have been treated well. Your company comes out ahead when you turn customers with problems into satisfied customers.

"For want of customer service, an empire was lost…." Don't let it happen to your company!

Until next time, thanks for Talking Technology with me!