Be honest. You expect to receive lousy customer service. Right? Sure, you hope customer service surprises you. But how often do they?

Unfortunately, customer service is often an equal opportunity offender.

We need a sentencing to a rehabilitation program for lousy customer service.

Fixing Lousy Customer Service

Think of lousy customer service like a broken leg. You want rehab to increase flexibility, restore mobility, and to build strength. So, how can you do that for customer service?

The following shares a few ideas.

 

Increase Flexibility

The cast for a broken leg provides support and prevents further injury while the bone heals.

• Individuals complain about the stiffness of their leg when the cast is removed.
• Rehabilitation helps increase the flexibility in muscles gone lazy.
• The same can happen to customer service.

Arthritic Rules

Management creates rules for structure and support. That’s not a bad thing – if you remember to remove the cast of rules when it makes sense.

For example, think about child-proof caps on prescriptions. Makes sense, right?

• Now, think about my 99-year-old mother with her arthritic hands.
• Does it make sense to have child-proof caps on her prescriptions?
• Hardly.

One pharmaceutical company changed the caps with a signed waiver from my mother. Another company would not do it because that was “the rule”  – the ultimate lousy customer service response.

It’s likely that someone once sued a company because a child could (or did) get into a pill bottle. Result? Child-proof caps for everyone. Even if it doesn’t make sense.

Over 70 million baby boomers keep aging (not that I’d know anything about that 😉). Businesses need to think about boomer customers and their packaging that requires a drill to break into.

Inflexible rules lead to lazy, lousy customer service. Share on X

Restore Mobility

Few people have a cast off one day and go out running the next. Okay, bad example. Runners are their own breed. However, for us mere mortals, we may need rehabilitation to restore mobility.

Nothing freezes customer service faster than front-line employees with no power.

Empowering customer service takes many forms.

• Giving representatives the authority to make exceptions
• Training them to recognize when exceptions work best
• Rewarding those who identify obstacles to good service

Another lousy customer service example

A certain insurance company (that shall remain nameless) issues Medicare supplement plans. When open enrollment season began, the Medicare beneficiary received no notice regarding the premium for the upcoming year.

Luckily, the person had a brilliant daughter who knew a thing or two about insurance. The short video explains.

Think about that. If you have a subscription/membership/whatever that renews every year, don’t you receive notification of the fee? Even if the fee remains the same?

The dutiful daughter explained the need for something in writing. The administrator for the mom’s Health Reimbursement Arrangement (HRA) required a document showing the premium to set up monthly reimbursement.

Yet, again, the request was denied. Because that’s the way their system was programmed and there was nothing the customer service representative could do about it.

When is the last time you had a company tell you they couldn’t put a renewal fee in writing?

• But don’t worry.
• It’s not going up.
• ..so just trust you?

Funny (?) thing happened. The premium increased on 2/1. 😊 At least we finally got something in writing. But a delay for the January reimbursement occurred due to no documentation stating it did not increase. ☹

Empower customer service to identify - not create - obstacles to good service. Then act on it. Share on X

Build Strength

Have you heard the saying, “You’re only as good as your word”?

Business is all about trust. When trust is broken, the rehab time for building it up again is lengthy. Trust may never be restored.

Empty promises can be even more frustrating.

For example, we have a subscription for our dog’s food. The site fulfilling it assigns points for purchases. The dog food is the only item we purchase from the company.

• We received notification our points had earned us 10% off.
• I contacted customer service to have it applied to the next dog food order.
• The representative advised we could not use rewards for a subscription.

In one inflexible, unempowered moment, customer service destroyed my trust. Sure, it wasn’t the individual. But who is the face of the business?

You can't build trust with empty promises. Share on X

Good Customer Service

Businesses that know how to do customer service right do exist – like those I shared in this post.

In a future post, I’ll share some examples of good customer service. You may be surprised at how simple it can be.

Whether you are a business of one employee or thousands, customer service is what makes you stand out. Why not make it great?

• Be flexible when it makes sense
• Enable smart decisions
• Strengthen promises

What stories do you have? Please share them in Comments.

Note: The original of this post published on February 14, 2017. This October 5, 2022 version updates it.

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