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Written by Neil Barr
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Friday, 16 October 2009 15:08 |
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There are right ways to do things, then there’s the ‘sometimes no response would have been better’ way.
Firstly, let me explain, this is not a rant about poor spelling or grammar (before people pick this post apart). Nor is it about dyslexia, those with English as a second language, or even just those too busy to check what they’re typing before it’s sent. This is about customer service and why it is important for an organisation to make sure all their staff know the right way and the wrong way to deal with customer issues – especially when email is now the main method of communication.
Recently we’ve had some very serious concerns about one of our suppliers. They are a data centre we lease servers from to host some of our client sites. Although we have used them for many years, it is only recently that we have had concerns about the level of service. Increasingly we get conflicting information from them, or wildly inaccurate information. Some of the more extreme circumstances have involved down time for our clients and a very worrying tendency to resolve everything by just wiping drives.
Due to the issues we’ve had, we made a complaint to senior managers – or the ‘Big Kahuna’ as they like to call him. From our fairly detailed complaint, this is the response we received from a senior team leader;
Hello,
We do apologize for any inconvenience this mau hav caused you cause and will make every effort to avoid this occurring in the future.. As we do not install Codlfisio on our installs it is often harder for some technicjo9ans to diagnosed boser ss; such as this. It apperas that your cold fusion services are now running and you now have winVNC installed so you can resolve manye remote connectivity issues tonight
I have appli9ed a 1 month credit to you account to help yhou dtrhough the recovety process.
Please note, we’ve not edited this in any way. So, it begs the question, which company in their right mind would allow staff to respond to a serious complaint in this manner?
We now have even less confidence in this organisations ability to provide a professional service. Instead of taking the complaint and turning it around to their advantage, this hastily and shoddily put together response has pushed the issue in to the ‘off the wall’ category.
With email, Twitter, SMS and other ‘instant’ communication methods within reach of most employees, that allow them to send out messages before they’ve even had time to consider the correct response, it is now more critical than ever to ensure that everyone in your organisation – from the bottom up – understands the old adage “think before you leap”. Just because you know the correct way to respond (or even the basics of a spell check) doesn’t mean your staff do. Years of good work can be undone in the instant click of a button – though in this case, maybe they should have simply thought twice before typing with boxing gloves on.
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