Customer Service is More Than a Contact Form

As regular readers will be aware my blog topics tend to be somewhat diverse, but I strive to stick to subjects that will be of interest to at least a good percentage of my readers. So I’m excusing this departure from the technical on the basis that quite a few of my subscribers are in business for themselves.

Not long after my earlier article on customer service, in which I pointed the finger somewhat accusingly at one particular company, I received an e-mail from a senior representative of that organization, requesting a telephone conversation.

Matt Meanchoff is Director of Global Support at Absolute Software Corporation, the company behind the “LoJack for Laptops” service that I castigated somewhat severely in this article for their lack of response to e-mail contacts.

I want to emphasize at the outset that Mr Meanchoff didn’t call to criticize my article or to offer excuses for the experience I had with his company. He wanted to explain what had happened and why, and he soon convinced me he was genuinely concerned to fix any problems that adversely impacted customer service.

This in my view is a commendable response and demonstrates a willingness to address problems of which they were unaware. After all, if we have problems with a company, what more can we wish for than that they listen and act?

Is your business making these mistakes?

Publishing an insight into our conversation could provide a timely lesson for other online businesses who are making similar customer service mistakes, possibly quite innocently and unknowingly.

Mr Meanchoff explained that the e-mail address I had used to contact his company was distributed into the company’s sales channel. He is adamant that his own area of responsibility, actual technical support of existing customers, has earned high praise from their customers. Mr Meanchoff came across as pleasant, credible, highly motivated and a believer in his company’s products and services, so I have no reason to doubt his claim in that regard.

He was quick to acknowledge that there was no excuse for the communications failures I had experienced, regardless of what internal department was responsible. He was obviously well aware that if prospects don’t become customers due to communications failures in the sales channel, then his support team never gets a chance to demonstrate their effectiveness.

Customer-friendly tips for every business

Speaking to Meanchoff I became convinced that Absolute Software wanted to address those shortcomings as soon as possible, and I made three suggestions which I believe should be implemented by any company doing business online:

• Turn off the sending of the “read receipts” in the e-mail client programs of all employees. This prevents your customers from receiving the obnoxious “deleted without being read” message. This is not disadvantageous to the customer so long as you also implement the next recommendation.

The actual location for this setting may vary according to your version of Microsoft Outlook, but a likely location is:
Tools –> Options –> Preferences –> Email Options –> Tracking Options
Then select either: “Never send a response” or “Ask me before sending a response”

• Set up an auto-responder to immediately notify a correspondent that their message has been received and that they will receive a reply within a certain time frame. Marketing experience dictates that a specific time-frame should be given. Simply stating “as soon as possible” is not really acceptable, and nor is a long time frame. If you can’t respond to customer inquiries within 24 hours then I suggest you need to take a long hard look at your support infrastructure. If you can do better than that then say so, but don’t promise a response within one hour if there is little likelihood you could always meet that commitment. And don’t just stop with an acknowledgment, go the extra yard. When someone fills out your online form to contact you they aren’t left with a copy of their own message to refer to at a later date. So have your auto-responder include a copy of their original message. Little things like that make a big difference. Oh, and be consistent. Australia’s largest ISP promises a one-day response on their contact web form, and the autoresponse e-mail says you’ll hear from them within two days!

• Finally, provide an escalation contact. Whenever I suggest this one to my clients the response is usually that they don’t want to publicly display an executive’s e-mail address because it will be abused. Well, yes, it probably will, but you don’t have to display it publicly. This information can be provided in the auto-responder message: “If you don’t hear from us within 12 hours or if you are not satisfied with our response please notify our customer service manager directly at escalation@company.com”.

So after speaking with Matt Meanchoff I’m satisfied that my unfortunate experience isn’t indicative of an uncaring corporate attitude, but due solely to weaknesses in the communications chain — weaknesses that they acknowledge and want to address now that they’re aware of them. Again, that’s a positive and commendable response.

Handling bad publicity

So what about those disparaging quotes from Amazon.com that I repeated in my earlier article?

I have no way of knowing whether or not those complaints were justified, but I’m obligated to repeat an example that Matt Meanchoff provided.

The “LoJack for Laptops” service relies on a stolen laptop being used again. Until the BIOS code is executed at system start-up no communications related to identification/recovery can take place. So if a laptop is stolen (say for malicious reasons rather than for use or profit) and dumped in a river, there is no possibility of recovery. Fortunately for the great majority of laptop owners most theft is for reuse or sale, ensuring that the machine will be switched on again and thus given the opportunity to communicate.

No matter the nature of your business or how great your product or how careful you are, you are always going to have an unhappy customer here and there. I’m sure you’ve heard the old saying that goes something like: “A satisfied customer tells one or two people; a dissatisfied customer tells everyone”. In other words, anger and frustration incite people to speak up, while the satisfied just go quietly about their business.

So if you have a genuinely good product and a lot of satisfied customers, you must take positive steps to counter the few noisy ones. People responsible for marketing and customer service need to be constantly on the lookout for comments about their product, whether good or bad. The good can often be used to your advantage, and the bad must be countered.

You cannot afford to ignore bad publicity and hope that it will just eventually fade away, because once published on the Internet it can always be found — days, months and even many years later. It will turn up in the search results of the very people you want to attract: targeted prospects who are searching specifically for what you offer.

Many professional Internet marketers retain inexpensive offshore contractors to continually search the Web for any mention of their product, their competition’s products, their marketing niche, and so on — anything they can use to give them a competitive edge or, if necessary, protect themselves from bad publicity. Mainstream businesses could learn a lot from the tactics employed by Internet marketers.

Absolute Software should have discovered those Amazon comments themselves when they were first posted. They would then have had the opportunity to contact the complainant’s directly and try to sort out their problems. At the very least they could request some of their many satisfied customers to post positive responses as a counter. This is well worth doing even if you have to offer your satisfied customers an incentive to do so. But if your customers aren’t prepared to speak up for you then they probably aren’t as “happy” as you’d like to believe!

Because the last thing a company wants is to have someone like me, having already had some bad experience, finding a site where 100% of the comments are disparaging. That just reinforces my original impression.

In contacting me, explaining the situation, acknowledging the shortcomings, Absolute Software has convinced me to take the next step and report on their recovery service and technology, something that, hopefully with their assistance, I’ll be doing in a future article.

So long as customer concerns — your concerns — are being addressed, I’m happy to investigate the practicalities of any product or service impartially.

Afterthought…

One last thing I just thought of.

While Absolute Software boasts a professional looking website with lots of resources available, one thing I wasn’t terribly impressed with was the fact that all the testimonials were apparently from law enforcement officers. Sure, it’s good to have people like that on side and saying so, but prospective users of the service will be looking for the experiences of actual existing customers. Law-enforcement is obviously going to have a different interaction with the company than will customers of the service.

I’m happy to report that what I missed the first time around was the Case Studies link.

What’s the difference between a case study and a testimonial? I suppose you could say that a testimonial is a customer experience told in the first person, whereas a case study is more likely to be a story told in the third person.

But regardless of the semantics, there are plenty of customer experience stories to be found — 41 of them in fact at the time of this writing. You can check out their case studies here.

Related articles:

• Is Customer Service Really the New Marketing?
• Ted Mininni: For Sale: Business Culture