Is it me, or do people just not care any more about customer service?

It never ceases to amaze me when I send an email to a company, asking a few simple questions, how few of them actually take the time and trouble to read and answer every single point.

Some may answer part of my email, while others don’t even address anything I actually raise, preferring instead to respond with some boilerplate BS that is nothing to do with what I really want to know.

As somebody who co-owns a company and who is responsible for almost all of the customer service, via email, live chat and telephone, I can’t begin to understand what sort of bizarre policy would mandate that you don’t answer what your customers (or potential customers) want to know.

I guess it must be endemic by now.

I spent nearly 20 years working for a major British company, and the policy in the call centre there was staggering – if you can’t get the customer off the phone within a couple of minutes, pass the question on to some back office somewhere and wash your hands of the whole problem.

Of course, it doesn’t take the Brain Of Britain to realise that this causes yet more work and therefore costs more, in both time and money.

For starters, you need procedures and systems to handle, control and monitor these “hand-offs” (that’s code-speak for passing the buck, of course).

And then, as the back office rarely responds to the customer within the allowed service levels, the customer will ring back again (and maybe again and again), to chase up what is happening with their query.

That not only pisses the customer off, but also ties up yet more valuable company resources dealing with these chaser calls.

It’s hard to find anybody who actually thinks this is a good policy: the customers don’t like it, not surprisingly (and I know this for a fact because I personally talked to some of them myself); the call centre staff don’t like it because for the most part, they want to do a good job and actually answer customer’s questions; and the back office don’t like it because they get inundated with stuff and can’t keep up (oh, the joys of “down-sizing”!).

It’s hard to believe, but I’ve seen it with my own eyes many times: if a call centre operator is on the phone for too long (and we’re talking a few minutes here, not half an hour or more), then the supervisor will come and stand over the operator and tap their watch, which basically means “get rid of the call now”.

When almost everything these days has become some sort of commodity, it would seem that good customer service is about the only differentiator that’s left, so why don’t more companies care about it?

Statistics show anything you want that people are more than twice as likely to tell others about bad customer service than they are about good customer service.

Given that offering good customer service has a relatively low cost, I can’t believe that companies would willingly choose to present such a bad image when they could just as easily present a good one.