Customer Service: The Bad, The Ugly And The ‘Swypit’ Good

Good customer service is hard to find today and it’s getting harder. I’m going to share some customer service stories that reveal the good, the bad and the ugly of this side of doing business. But first let’s look at what causes poor customer service in the first place.

The five main causes of poor customer service include:

1. Hiring the wrong people
2. Lack of training
3. Employee burnout
4. Misunderstanding customer expectations, and
5. Lack of employee engagement

I preach this stuff all the time. Let’s talk about hiring the wrong people. You know, you can read somebody’s resume, but what you might not know is that they hired somebody to professionally write their resume. So, the resume looks good and then that person with the good-looking resume gets hired. When they get that job, that’s when you find out that resumé was baloney and the person can’t do the job they were hired to do. People are just going to say anything they ca to get a job these days, so as an employer you must be able to recognize the slackers before you hire them. Employers need to take extra measures when hiring people particularly if they are going to represent your company as a customer service representative.

Another cause of poor customer service is lack of training. It seems to me that customer training goes something like this today. “You’re hired. Now, here you go. Here’s the script. You’re going to log into this thing and you’re going to read the things here, based on certain words the customer says to you.” Then those customer service reps are trained to put you on hold so they can try to figure out what’s really wrong. Next thing you know, the call has failed, and you have to call back again! Listen, I fight this every day for our clients.

Now, the last thing on the list that causes poor customer service is lack of employee engagement. Think about this: people will call up, get customer service and talk to them. Then the customer service rep says, “Yeah, we’ll get back to you.” Then you know what happens? Absolutely nothing. They don’t get back to you.

Swypit Does Customer Service Like Nobody’s Business

We do customer service differently at Swypit. A straight five-minute phone call from me to my clients is all it takes to assist our clients when things go wrong and make things run right. Hey, if it’s necessary we’ll spend fifteen, twenty minutes, even two hours on calls to find out all of the issues if our clients have a problem. Do we have a lot of these instances where we’re on two- hour, three-hour phone calls? No, our clients get the best customer service. If there is a problem, we solve it immediately. If there’s a bigger issue, then we’re going to do the work to find out what it is. And then we’re going to get back to the client and give them the solution.

I did a customer service call just the other day for one of our clients. We needed to fix something. We got it swapped out. We got it fixed and then they said, “I need to get a copy of this.” Boom! five minutes later they had a copy of the information. there wasn’t anybody calling in and waiting two or three hours. We did all the work to assist them. That’s what good customer service is. That’s what it’s like to work with Swypit. That’s customer service at its best!

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