Renee’s Rule™: There’s more to customer service than being nice.

July 11, 2009

I have concluded that the vast majority of companies today either do not agree with and/or do not care about and/or are clueless about how to implement the above Renee’s Rule™.   There is a good chance you have reached the same conclusion.  It has become incredibly difficult to get anything done.  The simplest tasks have become complicated.

There seems to be widespread recognition that being nice is an important part of customer service, but the other piece–making things easy for customers–has somehow been lost in translation.  Personally,  what this customer wants/needs is for the companies I deal with to make life really EASY for me.  What do you want/need?

As you may have guessed, this post is the result of a my experiencing a  spate of bad (abysmal) customer service over the last few weeks.  Everyone is NICE; nothing gets DONE--or gets done only with much wasting of time…..I know that you, too,  have “been there; done that;” e.g.,

  1. You are required to enter your phone number to get to tech support, but the first thing the person asks is, “May I have your phone number?”
  2. You call for repair help.  You provide a description of your problem in infinite detail, but the details somehow do not survive the distance between customer service and the people who actually do the repair work, and it takes forever to get the problem solved.

I understand that many of the  companies we call could not care less about whether they are wasting our time…but do they have so many customers, and are they making so much money that they don’t want to improve their bottom lines by streamlining their customer service?   Think of all the personnel time and $ that would be saved if no one had to ask, “May I have your telephone number?” or if the technical person “on-the-ground” received enough detail from customer service to solve the problem on the first try.

Enough complaining for one day–you can tell I’ve had too much TERRIBLE customer service from too many NICE people….It may be time for a new Renee’s Rule™: Enough is enough!”

In future posts, I’ll share some examples from my personal experience about how companies can reduce costs AND provide better customer service.