In the past 6 months I have made 2 drastic changes in the company I manage.
I closed 2 accounts with companies we’d partnered with for years on different fronts (IT and financial) and switched to a competitor.
What was the driving factor?
COMMUNICATION. HUMANITY. SPEED OF RESPONSE.
Was it about money?
Sure that too, but it was NOT the real driving factor. These days pricing if often similar between competitors because it’s difficult to compete in a market where competitors pop up like mushrooms in a dump forest. Hello globalisation… nice to see you.
When the barriers of distance disappear, inevitably the pool of choice becomes immense and often difficult to deal with. So what drives the decision on who to partner with?
For me it was the good old human side of things. When you’re constantly too busy to deal with life, what becomes of enormous value is real customer support. By support I mean the ability of a partner to stand by you when you have a problem, to understand you like a father and nurture you like a mother, because that’s what we all inadvertently seek as humans. So when for the 3rd time in 3 months I got a call from my team manager saying “can you please contact “X Company” because I’ve been waiting on a reply for 8 days and we just keep getting sent manuals to read” my blood boiled from within the darkest corners of my essence and the not-so-patient-and-tender side of me popped out like Strokkur (google the name and you’ll get what I mean).
I went medieval on the X Company and explained why we badly needed better support.
They promised but didn’t deliver.
That was 6 months ago. We’re now with a new company, we’ve spent a lot of staff time (which means money) to do this, but I no longer get frustrated calls from my team manager.
Same thing happened with a “payment processing” company recently. The costs of the old provider seemed too high so I contacted them for a contract revision and at the same time I contacted 2 competitors. The existing partner sent us a guy to speak to us who probably still had no pubic hair, had no clue on the history of our account or our needs; within 15 minutes he managed to say “I believe I need to get in touch with a senior manager to discuss your account”, only he should have known that from our email (or maybe his boss should have spent less time playing scrabble and more time reading important emails from key customers…).
After this pointless visit we got 2 standard emails from their support asking us to go and read infinite manuals on their website for their T&C and renewals options.
Meanwhile one of the two competing companies I had contacted (let’s call them Company Y) got in touch with us, put someone who understood our problem, gave use direct phone numbers and ability to remote connect with their team to understand our needs.
Two weeks later we were with Company Y. Even now, after 3 months from opening the account I know that if I don’t understand something or my manager needs a revision of anything we will get a reply within 48 hours and a phone call or online meeting within the week. I have never looked back since and I thank the pubic hairless kid for making me understand it was time for us to move on.
Lastly, I booked a long haul flight myself last week for a business trip and ended up using a large worldwide service provider. When it came to paying (the same money I would have paid buying directly from the flight company) I got asked if I wanted to pay an extra €45 for premium support. I didn’t because when you spend €1.500 on a flight you should get a fair support anyway right? I contacted them after the booking to add vegetarian meal option to my flights. There was no way of emailing them, so I was forced to chat online, which was crap and took an hour to get done. In the end I was told they’d deal with the request. It’s been 9 days and I have no news. So what?
Simple. They just lost one of their new customers… for LIFE.
And what I found hilarious was that after automatising everything on their website and making it impossible for me to contact anybody they sent another automated email with a short survey to ask me how they did because they “cared” about me!
Guess what, care is not shown with words but with facts. We’re in a fast era where you just want your stuff done, where you don’t want to accept new T&C’s every 2 weeks (yes Apple and Google.. how about we give it a rest for a while?), we’re tired of bad automation and people trying to steal money from you hidden in the form of the word “premium” (which normally means get the same you already did but it will look prettier so we can take twice the money from your c-card or get shafted with option 1 so you’re forced to upgrade to option 2… erm, no thanks!).
Today human support and qualitative care is essential. Period.
We want people to understand our culture (e.g. through communication style) and our needs. And it doesn’t matter if I am speaking with a Nicaraguan or Spanish support person, as long as we understand each other, as long as I am being looked after, and as long as he/she is not reading from a script!
Qualitative customer care is expensive, but, at least from what I can see in my field, it PAYS OFF in the long run.
You just need one person to have a really good customer support experience and they will stick with you. In exactly the same way, you give them a poor support service and the likelihood is that (as happened to me) they will leave you as a provider and speak negatively of you for the rest of their existence.
Marco Spiezia 