A well-designed searchable set of answers is a great resource for customer service. But if your “FAQ” is actually a huge, rotting pile of crap, you do a disservice to customers by sending them there. A little context. My home has a Sub-Zero refrigerator/freezer. It came with the house. And as I learned from the…
If an employee of a company told you something wrong that cost you money, you could sue the company for damages. It’s the same with a chatbot. Here’s what happened. Air Canada features a customer service chatbot on its website. You’ve probably interacted with service chatbots like these on other companies’ sites — I researched…
Could you use triage make more customers happier? Based on my recent experience with urgent health care, maybe you could. My visit to Urgent Care This weekend, while attempting to open some stubborn product packaging with a scissors, I stupidly managed to gouge a half-inch cut in the palm of my left hand. Being a…
Organizations email individuals all the time. The sender is often something like “do-not-reply@organization.com.” That’s a massive “screw you” to the customer, and it doesn’t have to be. Why do those “Do Not Reply” emails exist? There are lots of reasons that companies send emails from a “do not reply” address. The main one is some…
Sometimes a company doesn’t live up to what it has promised you. That can make you angry. What should you do about it? This post is about what happened when a company called LeafFilter disappointed me, and what I did about it. My father’s mirror I want to start by talking about my father. The…
I’m on hold right now waiting for a customer service rep — to investigate a serious problem that I neither caused nor asked for. I’d give up, except that resolving this is crucial to my future. And it’s hell. If the experience of calling your call center is a hellscape, your customer experience is terrible….
Marketing has such a poor reputation that it now has to pretend to be customer service. And it makes me hopping mad. For example . . . The reason is simple. We all want to open customer service messages from our current providers. We are far more likely to ignore marketing messages. The marketers at…
I used Google’s chat support. The result was infuriating, because the support person didn’t listen. Humans doing support need to listen and use context — and you’d think algorithms could help with that, especially at Google. Here’s what’s happening. I just set up a new web site for my nonprofit, wellnesscampaign.org. The next step is…
UPS has the information about customers, locations, and shipments to be an amazing leader in customer experience (CX). It has the people, devices, and bar codes to turn the Internet of Things — of packages — into an artificially intelligent engine for customer delight. But based on my experience, UPS is the slave, not the master,…