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April 22, 2005
Customer service - just leave me alone
Companies spend a lot of money to get their customers into the door - basically selling them. It is also well known that it is expensive to create a new customer - so my question, in general, is - why do companies treat us so badly?
Forget about the 80/20 rule that says that 80% of your business is created by 20% of your customer. While it might be true in hindsight, it is no feasible measurement during the moment of truth. No customer service assistant is able to check the statistics, when you come into their door. They won't be able to says "sorry - cannot serve you, you are in the wrong category."
Still, companies spend plenty on data collection. Everywhere you go, you see it - it is actually unbelievable how bad service is considering the fact that companies should know what is the desire of the customer. But instead, companies appear to focus on sales and marketing and lesser, much lesser, on aftersales service. Sure, this strange animal called service costs money - sales generate money. May be there needs to be more awareness that happy customers tell others about great service? But then, whom do I tell this, when companies don't actually listen!
CNet published a new study and the numbers they have are frightening. Okay, these are data from the US and the study relates to the responsiveness of companies to inquiries made by the consumers. Nevertheless, I believe we can leverage the data to Asia as well.
The study says that "70 percent of consumers go to a competitor's site if they don't receive a timely response to an online inquiry."
A bit further down in the article they write that "So what happens to the people who don't get an answer within a day? Some get a response the next day, but a third receive messages that deemed unhelpful, often involving canned text and stock answers directing users to the Web site. An amazing one out of five customers never receives a reply. The rest get replies that dribble in over the next three to four days, and they often ignore them, having since moved on."
Good morning to all of those who don't respond to e-mails and inquiry. May be instead of rebranding and spending on marketing companies should just start improving their customer service first?
Tagged under
customer experience
customer satisfaction
customer service
Posted by Andreas at April 22, 2005 03:40 PM
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Comments
You're back!! Anyways, I had the problem when I was coming to Canada. I need a mobile service provider to allow messages to be sent to Malaysia and Singapore. I emailed one of them: Fido. Then I emailed another: Bell. No reply. I gave them 5 days. So when I touched down. I went to the their competitor: Rogers. Hahaha. I guess they lost a few customers since I told everyone in my res "Fido Sucks", get Rogers. Haha.
Posted by: Ivy at April 23, 2005 12:14 AM