We know, or at least I thought we did, the importance of customer service and their experience. It’s critical in so many ways.
- If we have a subscription model, customer service/experience is vital to retention, renewal and expansion. If our customers can’t get the service they need, they won’t get the value expected, and they will leave.
- If we want to sell more to our customers, if they have a bad experience with our products, they are highly unlikely to want to do more business with us.
- If we have follow on products/solutions and we want our customers to upgrade, they won’t if their experience with current products is unsatisfactory.
- And customers talk to each other. If they have a bad experience with our products/services, they will tell others. And those people will tell others, “I was talking to Bill about XYZ’s products. Bill says their support is terrible and he’s doing everything he can to change to another vendor…..”
Go to company’s website. All of them proclaim, “the customer is first, customer experience is our number one priority, we are here to serve our customers, we value our relationships with our customers….”
But when something happens, do they live up to their claims? Or is it just Lip Service?
Over the years, I’ve seen customer service and my experience plummet. And it’s not just me, virtually everyone I speak with echoes this view. One would think with the advances of technology, and now AI, customer service and experience would skyrocket, instead it’s gone the opposite direction, perhaps plummeting faster than win rates are plummeting.
In the “old days (a few years ago),” I would go to the support page. There would be all sorts of alternative–manuals, videos, support forums. I’d type a query into the top of the page and get relevant results. Now, it’s much more difficult. First you have to find the support page. It’s often hidden, you have to go through page after page, or scroll to the bottom of a website page to see in the fine print, “Support.” When you find it, they increasingly difficult to navigate. The other day, I entered a very specific problem. I was presented with 1527 documents. I skimmed the first 5, none had anything to do with my problem.
Often, there is a “helpful” chatbot. I enter my question. After some time, it ignores my question and starts to register me. I go through the registration, it asks me my problem. I retype my question. Inevitably, it ignores my question, asking, “Is your problem A, B, C, D or something else?” I reply “It’s something else….” With all it’s intelligence, the response is, “Is your problem A, B, C, D or something else?” I go through that loop a number of times and never help with my actual problem.
Sometimes, I’m given the option of interacting with a human agent. I select that option and wait….. and wait….. and wait….. It’s not unusual to wait for 10 minutes or longer. And I have to go through everything again, the agent says, “Hi Dave, how can I help you?” I have to start all over. The time I spent with the AI agent is irrelevant, so I start all over. I type, “This is my problem…..” I hit enter and wait….. wait…. wait…. “Are you there,” I type.
Eventually the agent comes back, asking me for a further description. I type it in, and wait…. and wait… The other day, it took 3.5 minutes for the agent to respond to my input. For truly tough problems this becomes impossible. It takes too much of my time, so I give up and figure out a workaround.
Sometimes, when I try to phone in for support. First of all, I have to find number. Companies seem determined to discourage this, they bury the contact numbers. When I eventually find the phone number, you can guess what happens. “Thank you for calling for support, press 1 if this is your problem, press 2……” I press the appropriate number, then get another message, “Press 1 if this is your problem, press 2…..”
When I finally get to the end of the phone tree, 100% of the time, I get, “All our agents are busy, your call is in queue. The current queue time is 375 hours and 15 minutes…..” OK, I’m exaggerating, but not by much. Sometimes, they give you an option of the type of hold music you listen to—because they care about our “hold” experience. Sometimes they say, “We can give you a call in roughly 375 hours and 15 minutes….”
At this point, one starts wondering, “Do they really want to talk to me? Do they care about solving my problem? Do they really care about customer service and experience? Or do they just want me to go away, yet continue to collect the money from my subscription?”
The worst experience I’ve had in the past few months is with Evernote I’m having trouble signing onto my account. The problem is, the only way you can get access to customer service is by signing onto the account. But if I can’t sign in to the account, how can I get help signing in to the account? Then they made it worse: to get help, I’d have to upgrade my account, a 55% increase, annual plan only. They don’t care about my satisfaction. They want my money. They’re holding my data for ransom.
I could go on and on. But you already know this. You’ve been through it before.
Companies talk about customer service and experience, but they don’t want to talk to you. They do want you to renew, they do want you to upgrade. But they really don’t want to help you.
What we really experience is performative empathy.
Here’s the irony. My go-to source for customer support now? The LLMs. I go to any one of them: “I’m having this problem with this product. Can you help me?” For most problems, it helps me navigate to a solution. It’s simple. It works. And when they can’t solve the problem they help me navigate reaching the company. These companies have effectively outsourced their customer relationships to third parties, and they don’t even realize it.
Perhaps that’s by design. Perhaps they could harness these same tools for their own agents. Perhaps if they did, they’d free up resources for the problems that actually require human expertise.
But all this depends on one thing. Do they really care or is it lip service?
They say customer experience is their number one priority. Their customers know better. And their customers talk to each other.
Afterword: This is a fun and fascinating AI discussion of this post. Enjoy!
Leave a Reply