Customer experience. Dealing with lousy service

Millions of customers across the country were at the receiving end of lousy service – from cellular phone operators, banks, car service centres or AOSP (any other service providers). What can be done when they get lousy service?

If you listen closely every time you get a lousy service, you can pick up some hidden words that keep coming up. When you “hear” those unsaid words you will know that the service provider is about to take you down the frustration path.

If you analyse the horrible service experiences you have had in the past, you will find some common traits across all of them. For instance, the service provider never tries to apologise or show empathy towards your situation. Neither will they be responsive nor reliable.

How can we know at the beginning about how our service experience is going to pan out? Try to listen to seven key words, none of which will be said to you explicitly. Essentially you will find most service providers somehow want to kill the customer’s problem, instead of looking at it as a service issue that needs process changes. This is also because of the failure to take up the right measures for strategic service objectives.

You will find these words hidden in some of the common statements lousy service providers make:

(i) “Please send your complaint to our corporate office with purchase proof”

(ii) “This Division is not responsible for the issue you have”

(iii) “Please go to our website or call our toll-free number to register your complaint”

(iv) “Our office in the city only can handle this, so you need to go physically there”

(v) “We will send the technician next week sometime”

(v) “We cannot take your complaint on phone as all our people are working from home because of Covid, so please send detailed email.”

Most people fail to hear the hidden seven words, and end up getting lousy service. So what can they do to recover – and get their rightful – value?

Getting back

(i) Find the contact details of the top executives – CMO, CFO and CEO – and write politely to them describing the issue with supporting documents if any. Use search engines and company website for preliminary search. If the email ID is not readily available on the website call the board line and ask the gatekeeper to connect to the CXO’s assistant.

(ii) If you do not hear from anyone within the next two days, not even an acknowledgement, take the issue to the board level using the LinkedIn contacts. If you are able to find the right names, tag them in a decently crafted message. Tag also the potential opinion makers who can increase the visibility of the message.

(iii) If there is still no favourable response, take the issue to the rest of the social media and try to create a firestorm using negative hashtags, Start with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, Signal and Telegram. Tag the company, its competitors and senior executives. Nearly all tweets that make up a social media firestorm are re-tweets. Therefore find the opinion makers in this area and tag them by following the networking etiquette. Be very logical and use eloquent language.

4. If none of the above works, use consumer forum and other legal options depending on the risk-return-value equation.

One other possibility that has worked for one-off services such as car rental or non-essential services is holding the service provider responsible via the credit card service provider. Always pay by credit card and raise a dispute with the credit card company to refuse payment to the erring service provider. This will at least you can buy time with the bank to clear the payments since they failed to support their customer – you!

The writer is Managing Director of CustomerLab Solutions and co-founder of the non-profit Medici Institute

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