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