What's Happened to Customer Care Part 2

Last week I blogged (ranted) about Customer Care and how we don't know what has happened to it. That was the Customer Care we receive when dealing face to face with small local businesses like the green grocers et al.

But what about Customer Care on the telephone? Mostly, we experience this through Big Business; your mobile phone service provider; your land line phone service provider (this one could be Big Trouble, if you get my drift); your utilities provider; your bank/building Society and any other financial institution like your car insurance company or your pensions firm. And of course government organisations like the people you pay your Council Tax to - not forgetting Revenue and Customs.

Dealing with complex  'Call Centres'
has  become a huge frustration
for  most customers these days

Have you ever tried getting through to your mobile phone service provider? The first thing you notice is that nobody but nobody wants to speak directly with you. There are recorded voices all over the Big Business industry to stop you speaking to real people. I ask you, is that Customer Care? "Welcome to blah, blah, blah company. If you're calling about blah, press 1; if you're calling about blah press 2. And so it goes on. You can spend 30 minutes or more just pressing buttons or listening to music to kill yourself by and nobody gives a monkey's. To add insult to injury, the system tells you that your call is being recorded for security and training purposes, which means that if you stuff up in any way they have a record of it to be used against you later. Is this Customer Care? Not likely.

Why is Customer Care so poor, these days? Well you will have your own ideas but I feel that a partial answer is the creation of Call Centres. They are the bane of our lives. At their inception, training companies were falling over themselves to write courses for Call Centre Training; most, if not all of those courses have ended up on the shelf because it doesn't take long to train people on which buttons and icons to click on and to say "I'm sorry, the system won't allow me to do that". Luckily for me, I decided early on that I would have nothing to do with these latter-day sweat shops.

Well Big Business require a BIG rant, so see you next time for some of the rest!

What Happened to Customer Care

Do you remember terms like 'Customer Care?' Are you familiar with slogans like 'The Customer is King' along with 'The Customer is Always Right?' Where have all those fine sayings gone to? OK, the sayings might still be there somewhere, perhaps even on a dusty poster in the stock room, but the treatment and actions that these sayings should engender no longer exists, it seems.

A Timely Reminder of Service

I recently returned a faulty item to the local store and explained that it was not fit for the purpose for which it was bought. This scenario lent itself to some great Customer Care, don't you know. She could have apologised and offered me the choice of changing the product or taking a refund. You'd think. But no. She asked if I had selected the item myself, in which case it was my fault. My fault, you understand for walking into the shop to spend money.

The local fitness club was not much better when I approached the reception desk to make an enquiry. No fewer that 3 people stood talking among themselves while I waited. And when someone deigned to speak to me, there was not a word of apology - until I asked for one; and even then it was offered as if under duress. If you rely on customers for your survival you could do worse than to remind yourself of this important fact; you don't have a business without your customers so STOP taking them for granted and START respecting them and CARING for them.

All well and good; but why does Good Customer Care seem to be on the decline? Well obviously there is the lack of training but it is a bit more than that because your local high street shop owners don't usually go on customer care courses. No, it seems to me that we are incubating a culture of Fear and Loathing; no one seems to like anybody and we seem to fear everybody we don't know. Have you noticed that every single store has a security gate through which you must pass to spend your money? As if the gates weren't enough, there are guards as well. And security cameras.

Is this because we are a nation of thieves? No. In my experience most people are fine upstanding members of the public - and they don't steal. But if you came from a different planet you wouldn't want to let go of your ray gun whilst out shopping, would you?

So You Think That's a Presentation

I am utterly fed up to my back teeth with the so-called presentations I see these days. At best they are boring; at worst they miss the purpose of the presentation entirely. What is it that makes people think that just because they can create some PowerPoint slides they don't need training in this fine art anymore?

When will people learn that their slides are not the presentation? If I were to define 'presentation' I would say 'a presentation consists of the words you use to form sentences that convey ideas either to persuade or inform an audience'.

Even Bill Gates can't help Confuse and Over Do the PP

PowerPoint is great tool but it was never meant to be abused in this way. It was always meant to help the presenter convey information, which is difficult to present with words alone; but most people these days write almost every single word they want to say on their slides, thereby using them as speaker notes and the audience ends up looking at slide after slide after slide. Why they even bother to stand in front of people I don't know for they might just as well roll the slides and let the audience read them. Why not? In any case we are in for a 'presentation', which is dull, dull, dull; lifeless, witless and boring and insulting to the audience.

Before PowerPoint, the training company I worked for used to run 12 presentation skills courses per year in the London venue plus 4 per year in Leeds, Manchester, Glasgow and Birmingham - that's 28 courses each year with a maximum of 12 people per course and they were nearly always full. With the advent of PowerPoint, these courses have dwindled to around 2 per year in London only with at times only 4 people attending - even with sales people covering the UK.

Please listen business people; if you must give presentations as part of your work, you owe it to your company, your audience and yourself to be properly trained in this area. People are often too polite to tell you that your presentation is crap, so you walk away thinking you were OK - you were not, PowerPoint was.

I have promised myself that unless I am training people, I will never sit and waste my time watching a slide show masquerading as a presentation ever again. I am going to walk out because there is absolutely no excuse for a poor presentation.