We’ve all had the experience of feeling oh-so-small at the hands of a large company. Sometimes that happens during the sales process, but at least then we have the option of walking away. When it really stings is after we’ve purchased a product or service. That feeling of powerlessness—that they’ve really got you—is immensely frustrating to most people. But now people have ways to fight back. This was all brought to mind again when my wife told me about how she spent her day yesterday.
We’ve owned Quicken for our personal finances for 10 years, but for most of that time we were using Quicken ’97 (I think) because it did what we want. This year, my wife (who does all the home finances) decided that she wanted our checking and credit card accounts linked up to Quicken, so we upgraded to Quicken 2008. She’s been struggling to make that feature work ever since.
Now, my experience with Intuit is that they are a smart company that spends more time on customers experience than most companies I know. So I was shocked when Linda told me how bad her customer service experiences have been. She was so annoyed by it that she wrote a couple of blog posts about it, one for yesterday’s Quicken disaster and another one for today’s Quicken service disappointment. Why does a smart company like Intuit spend so much to design their software but cheap out on customers service?
I wish that these incidents were more isolated, but all of us run into them every day. The part that I’ve never understood is how each of us can relate to those poor customer experiences, because we’ve undergone them, but still dish them out when we are on the job. Or stand idly by while others dish them out on our behalf. We rationalize the reasons we behave this way, but we still do it.
More and more, however, customers are firing back, whether it’s a blog entry like Linda’s, message board complaints, or ratings and reviews. Or something bigger.
Comcast has been bedeviled by angry consumers the last couple of years, with everything from the sleeping customer service technician video to a site called Comcast Must Die. But they’ve started to change. In fact, Comcast Must Die just announced that Comcast is listening to them enough that they are branching out to handle complaints against other companies. So, customer vigilantes demanded changes from Comcast, got them, and are now moving on to right other wrongs.
What about your company? Does your customer service team inspire loyalty or outrage? Are you listening to what your customers are saying and responding? Or are you simply following procedures or saying that things are not your job? One thing that I know is that no customer ever got excited by service that merely followed the procedures.
