Hey! You! Grocery check-out guy! And You! Fast Food Counter Person! Yeah You! Pay attention! See these !!!!!! They’re called “exclamation points.” They are used to denote forceful expression or strong emotion. Now that I have your obviously short attention span, I will be brief.
You may or may not realize that we are in a recession. It will do me no good to explain to you what that means. Let’s just say the economy is in deep s**t. So, even if you manage to hang onto your crappy minimum wage job through no fault of your own, you still may find yourself in the unemployment line. Why, you ask? Karma. It is because you treated me like crap when I was checking out at the store. Or when you purposely messed up my order in the drive-through line. You do something bad to someone. You reap what you sow. Okay, I’m sure that’s way over your heads.
Seriously though, customer service is so poor throughout American and even worldwide commerce that if one was a mean ol’ SOB they might think it was just deserts if the global economic problems took some snippy customer service weenie down a notch. But you are not like that are you, customer service weenie? Ha! You want to bet?
But it is truly amazing that a lot of the problems companies have in business are brought about by deplorable customer relations. The term “churn” comes to mind. I don’t think I ever saw the word used in the context of business until this afternoon. Maybe I had seen it but didn’t know what it meant. The word is used in industries such as television and wireless technology and relates to the measurement of the percent of customers who leave a business each month for voluntary reasons, usually this is for purposes of bailing to get a competing service. I figured churn would be fairly high across the board — even though I didn’t know churn was what it was called — but it really is higher than I imagined.
One study said that more than seven out of 10 customers switched companies due to poor customer relations compared to more than 40 percent who changed due to lower prices. About half of those customers reported taking some $4,000 worth of business with them.
Bearing such research in mind then, it is rather remarkable that when you talk to Biff or Sunny in Bangalore after waiting 45 minutes before your cellular drops your call and you call back and wait another 30 minutes, the nice young Midwestern-sounding customer service people from way East want nothing more than to get your ass off the phone. Every cell phone company I have ever dealt with, every Internet provider and the bank I have had for five years, all provide customer service that is abhorrent. And no one seems to give a rat’s ass! Yet, 73 percent of their business will bolt and it could cost 35 percent of those businesses at least $4,000.
So pardon me if I don’t shed a tear if a certain company goes blewey and must layoff 30,000 workers to reorganize. I won’t be laughing either. But I certainly won’t be crying.