Andy Yiu’s Blog

Customer Service Nightmares

Everyone at one point or another has had to call up customer service to take care of an issue. From working in Technical Support, I have seen a fair share of people I have seen and heard of people who have managed to bypass the normal process and get attention as quickly as possible by as many people as possible. An interesting article has appeared in MSNBC about what some customers have done to get the attention they need after they are neglected customer service representatives. I still remember the times where I have asked an ISP (who shall remain unnamed) to troubleshoot my internet connectivity issues. After four on-site service calls, and ten calls to customer service, I was told by unruly customer service manager to stop calling customer support and I’ll have to live with the twice a day sporadic outages that reset my VPN and VOIP services. Some companies have now decided that dropping customers is better than maintaining customers. With the current economy as it is and the U.S. on the brink of a recession, I am not sure how some businesses can justify dropping customers instead keeping a customer and give them incentives to make the content. Some studies have even shown that attracting a new customer can cost eight to ten times more than maintaining an existing customer. Take a read of the article “Customers backlash against bad service“.

Here is the video which is referenced in the article: