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
You’d think that given a focus on the future, you’d ask specialists in the future to have some input, and whilst that didn’t occur for the PM’s Summit in Canberra over the weekend, some of Australia’s Futurists had already done the leg work to contribute their thoughts on the future of Australia. That report is…
Read More >Some of Australia’s leading futurists gathered in Melbourne in March to provide a specialist Futures approach to addressing the Australia 2020 Summit in Canberra. The outcome of that Summit and the development that subsequently followed has led to the creation of the report ‘Australia 2020 Futurists Summit’ that has worked through each of the ten…
Read More >Strategic Futurist Marcus Barber will meet with eminent ABC radio presenter Jon Faine on Wednesday the 16th of April to discuss the outcomes of the Australia 2020 Futurists Summit and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s Australia 2020 Summit in Canberra on the weekend With a focus on the future of Australia it would be only natural…
Read More >A group of leading Australian Futurists gathered over the weekend to consider the 10 core themes set to be tackled at Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s Australia 2020 Summit in Canberra in April. Convened by Strategic Futurist Marcus Barber, the 2020 Australia Futurists Summit utilised some of the advanced facilitation and strategy development techniques as a…
Read More >As preparations continue for the Prime Minister Rudd’s ‘1000 heads’ ideas summit in Canberra in April, a group of Australia’s leading futurists are gathering in Melbourne this weekend for the ‘Australia 2020 Futurists Summit’. The futurists attending the summit work across Australia, in corporate, not for profit and Government agencies in a variety of fields…
Read More >A few thoughts on what steps could be taken to overcome the ‘treat everyone like a nail’ approach that Interest Rate rises seems to do. Check out the idea under the ‘Latest Focus’ section Interest Rate Rises are going to penalise too many people who don’t deserve to lose their homes
Read More >Marcus Barber offers his thoughts on How to Stop Japanese Whaling in its Tracks and suggests that raiding boats won’t do the job. Instead he suggests that the key to negotiating with the Japanese is to have the Japanese people do the work. And to encourage them to do so we must begin to talk…
Read More >If an ‘Inconvenient Truth’ raised the profile of global warming to the general population, it appears that a willingness by political leaders to take appropriate action to mitigate the possible ramifications is still very much lacking. It is such a pity. No one who holds the Global Warming scenario close to heart wants to be…
Read More >Strategic Futurist Marcus Barber will join Tim Cox on 774 ABC as part of the conversation hour next week Tim is filling in for Jon Faine whilst he takes a well deserved break and Marcus will join him for the conversation hour kicking off at 11am on Thursday the 13th of December, where they’ll discuss…
Read More >At the AustForesight 2007 Conference, Strategic Futurist Marcus Barber and fellow Futurist Steve Tighe presented their take on what is required to enable futurists to be seen as more relevant to the Corporate world. Drawing on their shared experience as facilitator and client, they detailed the journey of foresight and futures across the past 50…
Read More >