It always amaze me to see companies spend millions of dollars on their products and than fall on simple things such as customer service.
In the last days I had a couple of very amusing and frustrating experiences with call centers in the US (which probably were actually routed to somewhere in India).
We found out that I'm missing a receipt for one of the flights I did with Delta. I called Delta customer service and asked if they can send me the missing receipt.
The (nice I got to say) girl that answered me requested first my sky mile number, the date of the flight and from where to where it was.
And than, to my surprise, she asked me if I will want to rent a car or hotel for this trip :) I'll just remind you that we are talking about a flight that already happened 3 months ago...
Now, it's not that the girl is stupid. It's probably just that she works by a written script she is not allowed to change. The script probably told her that after checking information about a flight, she should try to sell car rental and hotel.
My second tackle was with Amazon customer service.
I ordered a new TV to my apartment. The estimated delivery date was December 4.
A few days before that I got a call from the shipping company saying that they can deliver the TV two days before that. We scheduled a delivery time of between 11 to 14:00.
On the day of the delivery, I waited until 15:00 and the delivery didn't arrive. I decided to call Amazon and asked them if they can check it out.
I explained the situation to the Amazon customer service guy, but al I got from him was that the delivery is suppose to arrive just on the 4th of December.
As much as I tried to get him off his script and actually listen to what I'm telling him, I couldn't get even the phone number of the delivery company.
What's the lesson here?
Give your customer care people the option to think and not just follow a written script. If you think they can't handle this, pay $200 more and get someone who can.
Your customer wants to talk with people not with robots. It's not for nothing that this is called customer care.
