How Bad is Your Company's Customer Service Department?

I had a bad experience with a company I do business with recently.

It's a reminder that critical information often does not get to the top of an organization:

I called a customer service rep to dispute a charge on my invoice for something I didn't order. She said she couldn't remove the charge and that I should call "the president's line" to escalate the problem.

The president doesn't answer this line. In fact, no one does.The voicemail message said, "Thank you for calling the President's Line. Please leave a message and someone will respond to you within 24 hours."

I guess they didn't mean 24 consecutive hours. I left two messages over the past three weeks: No one has called me back.

Frustrated, I sent a letter to the CEO. An assistant called me three days later to apologize and correct the problem. The assistant was unaware of "The President's Line," learning about it for the first time from me. He said that the customer service rep had authority to refund the charge and was wrong for not doing so. He admitted that they do not regularly monitor Customer Service staff, but due to a recent surge of complaints recently, they were more interested in how bad it was in that department.

They waited far too, long, as I easily found two years worth of complaints when I searched the company's name on Google. I found entire web pages of complaints, and negative ratings of them on the epinions website.

Here are the take home points you can use to make sure your customer service department is truly serving your clients well:

1. By the time you get a complaint letter, the problem most likely has been festering for a while and has affected many of your clients. Act quickly to learn more about the problem.

2. Directly monitor customer service calls live or listen to recordings later. Do this weekly to learn how your clients are really being treated.

3. Do not rely on customer surveys to judge your customer service department. People who are frustrated with a company frequently give up, move on, and don't respond to customer satisfaction surveys.Survey former customers as a group to learn why they left your company.

4. Search your company name online with pejorative terms like "stinks" (and worse) to learn if there's a groundswell of discontent about your company. Customers who are frustrated will often resort to the Internet to warn others about bad companies.

5. Root out bad customer service staff. They will eventually kill your company's reputation.Make sure your corporate values are customer care are clear, and incorporate values into the hiring process to ensure that those you bring on to take care of your clients are staff members who truly value serving others.

The last point is the most important one. When someone prizes being of service to others, they don't need extensive training on how to help another person. They know how to do it instinctively. And great customer service helps build great companies.

The customer services department is the connective tissue between your company and your clients. Make sure you're not the last to know that they're the cause of a customer exodus.