Good morning, Team! It’s Friday!

Sometimes lessons are best taught by examples of what not to do. This is one of those times.

The two words in the blog title may never actually belong together in modern society, at least not to an average consumer.

If you have an issue with

•the cable provider

•your cell phone provider

•other utility providers

•electronics supplier

•appliance manufacturer

•mortgage company

•airline

•insurance company

•investment broker

•pizza joint

•or a host of other companies that regard you as a customer…you may have experienced one of a variety of ways we, as customers, are currently regarded, or disregarded as it were.

Example:You get put on hold for 30 minutes or more with horrendous music, variable volumes, constant interruptions by a recording telling you they know how valuable your time is but they are receiving “higher than average call volume”. I suppose that might be true of any hour of open business if you shut down your phones for 16 hours per day. Is the statement meant to invoke sympathy or simply another way of saying “We are open for business”. It might be a way of telling customers, “You don’t matter enough to us to actually staff enough representatives to answer the phone, we hope you hang up and if you call to complain, we’ll probably transfer you to a line that will ring constantly or just let you sit on hold indefinitely”.

If you are actually connected to someone, it seems a high chance it will be to someone who reads off of a screen and spends more time verifying you are who you are than actually solving your issue, concern or problem.

Leadership, in this case in customer support, requires you treat your customer well enough to invite them back, not drive them away.
It seems we’ve allowed a number of areas of life to devolve because someone wanted to save some money and we pay now with our time…waiting…for someone to pick up the phone…answer a chat message…or simply ignore us until we fall asleep or give up the request altogether.

Challenge:Stand up to the pressure to drive humanity out of your business under the veil of cost savings. Customers will pay for service (and respect).

Have a blessed weekend!