Are Your Customers in Good Hands After Hours?

Cultivating a relationship with your customers takes time, effort, and money. And with the economy the way it is these days, holding on to your existing customers while “Wow-ing” your new customers is a real challenge.


So who takes care of your customers after hours?

I use an online backup service for my personal computer at home. I signed up for the service over a year ago and enjoyed that sense of security every time I saw that an automated backup of the hard drive was happening.

Well as luck would have it, my computer crashed a few weeks back and despite numerous attempts to bring it back to life, I was forced to reload the Vista operating system on my Dell PC. Everything went fine but as a result, the hard drive was wiped clean. No worries, since I knew that backups were happening on a regular basis.

I sat down one evening and went to the company’s website to start the restore process. After making numerous attempts to log in and being told that my login name was not found, I jumped into the Customer Support online chat room to get help. Panic stricken, I explained to the rep that I had set up the account over a year ago but was unable to log in. The rep looked through the database and said they had no record of an account under any of the possible user names I provided.

At this point my blood began to boil. I explained to the rep in excruciating detail that the account was given to me free of charge by their VP of Customer Support as a professional courtesy. I made it clear that the software had always been running in my system tray and that backups were occurring on a regular basis. What I got from the rep was an apathetic response that “Well, I can’t find the account using the names you gave me so I can’t help you”.

Long story short, I contacted the VP of Customer Support who hooked me up with one of their Support Supervisors who worked during the day. Turns out my account was established on a beta site with a different URL than the one I was using. It was a simple mistake on my part and once I access that site, I was able to log in and restore my data without a hitch.

In the course of conversation with the Supervisor, I learned that their after hours support was contracted out to a third party organization. In my mind this explained a lot with the lack of empathy and concern from the night chat staff I dealt with. They showed no sense of urgency to my situation (tax returns, financial documents, health care information, my entire music library and 15+ years of digital photos all gone?), and after repeated attempts to have my situation escalated to a supervisor my chat session was abruptly disconnected (all documented BTW!).

Holding your outsourcing company to the same standards of performance as you would your own employees is a critical step toward building a true “world-class” customer support organization. All of the cost benefits associated with outsourcing will walk out the door (as I almost did!) if you don’t!