A few years ago, I attended a seminar with an expert who is considered a guru in Customer Service; Ron Kaufman. Mr. Kaufman went on an on about how we should upgrade from customer service concept to customer satisfaction, and then from the latter to customer delight! Remembering this now, after the lousy couple of days I had; I wish to God that Mr. Kaufman never sets foot in our country!
Mr. Kaufman is roaming the world teaching professionals how to upgrade to customer delight, summing up his knowledge in a great book called Up Your Service, and we are here still struggling with what customer service really is?!
In our world; there is no real meaning for phrases like: the customer is always right! Customer service agents do not realize that they are holding these jobs because they are supposed to serve the customer and make sure that he is content and happy with the product/service provided by his/her company, but what we are witnessing here is that the poor customer does all he/she could to keep the customer service agent happy!
Think about it; why would you even call the company if you did not need any help or service? Yet, these agents hiding behind phone lines or counters are rude enough to treat you like you were an insect that is bugging them and they have turned it into an art to make you feel like an idiot, as if you are supposed to know everything like they do. It is like they want to tell you that you messed up their calm uneventful day by your stupid call, you stupid you!
You can hear it in their voices over the phone that they hate your guts and they hate the fact that they had to answer your call. You can tell that they have this huge frown and wish that you would not ask another question so that they can go back to whatever they were doing, maybe they were playing a computer game or just too sleepy to order their brains to start working. What is even worse is when you can see them when you are getting the so called service face to face; like say when you are in a bank or trying to pay for groceries; don’t you just hate it how they start talking to each other as if you don’t exist? What makes them think that you don’t have anything better to do at that moment?
What makes this even worse and more tragic is that even when they know that they are wrong and that they made a mistake, they do not apologize to you, and they never ever smile! Are they that arrogant that your business is not important to them? Are they that not loyal to the company and they couldn't care less if it lost or gained you as a long term client? Or is it ignorance pure and simple?
We see large companies with hundreds of employees and fancy titles, their organization charts can fill a whole wall, each manager has managers and those report yet to more directors, those directors report to boards and boards to shareholders and the list goes on. They have departments for everything but they are all bubbles in the air that burst with the first customer experience.
I am really sick and tired of all these incompetent operators who do not know the ABC of phone manners, I have had enough of slow cashiers who take ages swapping items through the machine neglecting the line of people piling up waiting for their turn, I can't stand rude workers who do not know anything about their workplaces and cannot answer simple questions, I am fed up with staffs just hanging around for the sake of it and run away at the sign of a customer avoiding eye contact and pretending to be busy with something else and most of all; I am really disgusted with agents who think they are smart and treat me as if I am stupid!
Owners and managers of companies really need to train their people and carve it in their heads that the customer comes first and that he (the customer) is the reason there is a company/bank/organization/supermarket in the first place.
Customers, on the other hand, need to stand up for their rights and never accept mediocre treatment; you are paying to be served and if that does not guarantee you the good service you deserve, then maybe you should work harder on the attitude and make them serve you they way you like whether they like it or not. I can't even count how many times I had to snap at one of these agents who literally drove me crazy!
Needless to say; customer service is still a weird concept in the Arab World at large, and there Mr. Kaufman trying to upgrade their service to satisfaction and then to delight. My guess; it will be many years before we see this happening here, that is unfortunately of course!
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from Jordan