Customer Service – why the future is BEGGING you to get it right today
Another stream of consciousness on the customer service theme that I come back to frequently. If you’ve ever received one of those scam emails from say ‘the past Minister of the Immigration and Business Department in Nigeria’ seeking your assistance at repatriating funds for which you’ll be paid a fortune, or those other scams claiming to be from your ‘bank’ or other financial institution that start off with ‘Dear Sir/Madam’ or ‘Dear Customer’ and go on to ask you to log into your account to address security issues or issues to do with freezing of funds, along with the veiled threat of penalties should you choose not to act, then you know how tiresome they can be. And today I received one that started off with ‘Dear Customer’ and contained a threat of action regarding suspension of my account. ‘So what’s the problem?’ I hear you asking yourself. Well…
The problem is that this email was NOT from some spam merchant or scam merchant or phishing expedition looking for suckers – it was from an actual ‘customer service’ department of a genuine business here in Australia. To which I’ve responded requesting additional information:
1) Proof that they are who they say they are; 2) An indication that they know my name; 3) Details that would enable me to address the issue they say I have.
I couldn’t email them directly as their initial ‘spam/scam’ email set up was from a ‘do-not-reply’ email address (one thing that suggests this email is probably genuine -scammers really do want you to reply to them) and I had to find another email address from their website to stick in the reply address.
I then received an autoresponse email saying they’ll get back to me within two days. I’ll give them a bit longer and if they haven’t responded by them will tell you who they are, as well as suggesting other ways they are making it VERY hard for their customers to do business with them, which you can use as a thumbsketch of ‘what not to do when business is tough’ as part of your Customer Service Excellence file. Because if you don’t get your customer service right, later or sooner you won’t have a business to worry about
Columbia University’s Earth Institute have just made publicly available their World Happiness Report, joining the expanding list of happiness reports emerging ultimately from Bhutan’s Happiness Index. There’s some interesting results in this one and some that you might expect were more obvious, like the idea that at a certain point, more money won’t make you…
Read More >Whilst the main thrust of Australian economic activity is said to be in the hands of the Federal Government, we should not overlook the significant role that Local Council Government’s can have. As the Federal Government wrestles with falling taxation revenues and an apparent inability to get the message across about distributing the income of…
Read More >Strategic Futurist Marcus Barber chats with Vicki Kerrigan on ABC Radio Darwin about the challenges facing the Northern Territory, the farming and mining sectors. In summing up the emerging signs of a clash between agricultural uses of land and land use for resource and mining needs, Marcus uses the phrase ‘Eat or Extract’ as the…
Read More >As most of you know I nominated this year as the 2012 International Year of Resilience because frankly, that’s what I reckon large chunks of the world need right now. The twitter feed is #2012YearofResilience. I sent a few of these tips out at the start of the year and have seen a few of…
Read More >A new city is due to emerge in Darwin over the coming couple of years and the key question is – what sort of attention is being paid to weather related disasters in the design phase? Paul Dale on ABC Radio Darwin chats with futurist Marcus Barber about planning and weather. You can download the…
Read More >Dorothea Mackellar’s poem ‘My Country’ is best known for its second verse – “I love a sunburnt country, A land of sweeping plains, Of ragged mountain ranges, Of droughts and flooding rains”. As vast tracts of Australia again face the prospect of massive floods I wonder if our Urban Planners ever consider the significance of…
Read More >Potentially the biggest area of untapped competitive advantage (and arguably one of the biggest areas where costs could be reduced) is within supply chains. Most approaches to Supply Chain Management are linear and isolated with one player trying to squeeze the other with no regard to the overall effect of the full supply chain. It’s…
Read More >There’s a shift underway in the mining industry that will likely catch Australian airlines out if they aren’t paying attention – the shift toward ‘remote’ mining. Remote mining is being pushed by the automation ability across all aspects of current mining technology, which at the basic level, means that fewer humans are needed on site…
Read More >Simple question really. Or is it? In this quick article I provide an overview of the difference between strategy that is D.E.A.D and A.L.I.V.E Think of it as a potential ‘do this’ collection for your Organisation You can download the article for free here – ‘Is your Organisational Strategy D.E.A.D or A.L.I.V.E?’
Read More >Lots of thoughts for the year already underway, with some covering a range of ideas from ‘don’t cut corners on relative incidentals when the project is significant for you’ to ‘you can’t change your approach if you keep thinking inside the same box’. But for now a reminder about planning for your future: If you…
Read More >