Customer Care—Sometimes it’s Not in the Cards
I was at my neighborhood grocery store the other day and it’s one of those stores that requires “shoppers cards” to get the best price on certain items. Fail.
I’m a capitalist, and therefore I’m willing to let you track my buying habits in exchange for fifty cents off the price of milk. It’s a commercial transaction I can live with at the end of the day. Yes, I eat more then a healthy amount of ice cream and knowing that someone is running a tally somewhere is a bit worrisome, then again anybody can figure that out by scanning my tweets. My big issue with loyalty cards in this situation is the inconvenience of forcing me to carry a card. I’m the customer and you are putting the burden on me to carry around a piece of your plastic to identify myself. Have you met anyone recently who has spare room in their wallet to carry more cards? To make matters worse this particular grocery store is two miles from my house and I’m there at least once a week so I feel like they should say, “Hello Mr. Famous. Nice to see you again.” every time I walk in the door instead of asking me to produce a card to identify myself.
It reminds me of a conversation I had with someone from our Human Resources department recently. They asked me my employee number and they were shocked when I said I didn’t know. “You don’t know your employee number?” said the HR representative with a disapproving tone. “I am not a number!” I said defiantly, attempting to turn the tables on this individual. I understand the business process/system problem with identification but that shouldn’t translate into the customer’s problem.
You see the same type of approach used by nearly all customer care operations. When you call a contact center and you don’t have your case number, or customer ID handy you can sometimes even hear the faint groan of the customer care agent as they accept they’re going to have to do a bit of work to look you up to figure out who you are before they can open your case. Perhaps the groan is because I’m decreasing their chances of winning the prize for shortest AHT (Average Handle Time) that their supervisor doles out on a daily basis. Contact centers are about productivity but we must never let that get ahead of customer service.
Isn’t it the job of customer care operations (and really all businesses) to make it easy for their customers? Asking them to carry special cards, remember account codes, case numbers etc is not the path to great customer service.
Know your customers. And when you are in a situation where you have a customer and you don’t know who they are, whether that be a call into the contact center, a teller at a bank, or a check-out person at a supermarket; you should be humble about it and ask them to identify themselves in the way that’s most convenient.
By Tod Famous, product line manager, Cisco Customer Contact Business Unit
Posted by Tod Famous
at 09:20AM PST
Vijayakumar Jul 8, 2009
I am in need of customer care number for banglaroe surronuding. Need to check the device warranty status.
Please help