Customer Service

I just got done talking with a gentleman about his cable company that he works for. He was kind of complaining about the fact that 30% of his annual management salary bonus hinged on customer service ratings...

I prodded a little further and asked why it bothered him so much. He explained that customers get irate when their cable goes out for a few days (as anyone would be), and he thought that there was nothing he could do about their anger. No matter how nice they are to them, they still are angry about the cable being out and end up giving poor customer service reports.

I asked him if they ever off something to the customer for their troubles...such as a free month on their bills, or some other discounts, or any kind of offer. His reply was, "Once you get into management, you will understand that you cant just give stuff away to customers..."

That is the problem. I wanted to explain reverse marketing concepts to him, but I did not want to push the issue (seeing as though he was out to teach me a lesson about business).

Would it cost money? Of course. But to keep customers coming back for 20 years...what is it worth to you? Obviously not one month worth of cable costs for one customer and your bonus at the end of the year...

3 comments:

Dustin Davis said...

This is why I don't understand the concept of Dish Network pushing existing costomers away while spending so much to get new customers. I've seen it over and over. Why won't the spend a little extra to keep existing customers happy?

Anonymous said...

With the example of the cable company, I may disagree with pay-out incentives for compensating customers. If it was a statistically unique event meaning that the customer was inconvenienced by a non-typical circumstance, then by all means--pay out the nose to keep them loyal. However, cable and sattelite companies are synonymous with "outages."

The side effect based on Pavlov's experiments would suggest that every time that event was repeated, an expectation to be compensated would result. Therefore, the idea of compensating cable customers everytime something went wrong would be unsustainable by the business.

katty said...

Customer service is a series of activities designed to enhance the level of customer satisfaction – that is, the feeling that a product or service has met the customer expectation and it is all about bringing customers back.
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