A colleague recently shared his customer service experience of contacting his business email hosting service after having no access for more than 16 hours.
Real World Story: “The customer service experience I’m about to share with you is a true story. I’m not crafty enough to make up anything near this compelling.
“I was having a very busy morning and was checking email quite frequently because I had several deadlines approaching fast and was waiting on client updates. At one point, in my haste to log in to my Godaddy business email account, I entered the wrong username or password—or so I thought. I started getting an error message that my email address and/or password were entered incorrectly. Eventually, I stopped trying to log in because I didn’t want to trigger an auto-generated timeout because of too many failed attempts in a short period of time.
“Eventually, the error message changed. The error now read: Your browser is a bit unusual… Try disabling ad blockers and other extensions, enabling javascript, or using a different web browser. Well, I had no idea what that meant. And as far as I could remember, I hadn’t had any recent browser updates. But then the error message went back to telling me that I had entered the wrong username or password. Ugh!
I checked www.isitdownrightnow.com, and it said the site was up and functioning. I tried Godaddy’s System Status under the Help menu. Nope, nothing down and no maintenance right now.
“Well, after 16 hours of not being able to access my email—on any device and on various browsers—I decided to call Godaddy’s customer service line. The agent who answered—after a 15-minute queue wait—was a no-nonsense young woman who had zero empathy for anyone who doesn’t understand technology. I’m sure you know the type. They’re the ones who love to make you feel like the stupidest person in the room because they have a need to feel superior to everyone. But I digress…I explained my problem and asked if this had anything to do with my many failed attempts to login earlier the previous day or was Godaddy conducting some sort of maintenance or was this something that’s happening to anyone else.
“Her response: ‘This has been happening regularly to MILLIONS of our customers. Haven’t you googled the error message?’
“What? Are you kidding me?”
Strategies that Turn it Around:
- Immediately notify customers of problems: If several of your customers are experiencing the same problem—let alone MILLIONS of customers—maybe you should announce the problem and fix on your website, front office lobby, or via email and text using LARGE ALL CAPS BOLD type so everyone can see it? That may save you time on the phones—and save customers aggravation.
- Fake it: If you rely on Google as a customer service strategy, use the platform’s information as your own to walk customers through solving problems! Take the time to engage with customers and not just send customers to Google for answers.
- Talk with customers NOT over them. In some industries like technology, customer service agents need to be able to explain complex processes with simple, easy to use language. Using jargon and complicated terms will only confuse customers further. While it’s great to come across as an expert, it’s not cool to use that expertise to talk over customers to make them feel stupid.
Remember: Customer service is about people helping people. It’s about getting information to customers to solve their problems—and using that information to walk customers through complex processes. Google is great, but it’s not a great customer service strategy that should stand alone.
Does your organization rely heavily on Google or any other third-party platform to solve and/or assist your organization’s customer service delivery?