There's No Escape ...

Listen: no business is immune anymore from having dirty customer service laundry aired in public in the most frightful way. A call between a Dell rep and an angry customer illustrates this.

In essence, the customer was upset because he spent an hour on an automated system trying to find out how to turn off a laptop stuck in shut down mode. At the end of the call, he is told by the human Dell customer service representative to hold down the power button for 1o seconds. But the caller, by that time, was agitated almost to the breaking point (warning: the strongest language is involved).

While the Dell rep does not stoop to yelling back and appears calm, the smirk in his voice clearly comes through, and makes Dell look bad, bad, bad – really worse than if the rep had yelled back. The answer is to be authentic. No one would have blamed the rep if he’d complained about the behavior of the customer: that would have been an authentic, truly human response. There’s only one way to get respect here that I see, and that’s to just honestly care about how much time the customer’s wasted.

Banks : Don't They Have To Provide Good Service?

About a month ago, I got into it with my bank. The problem? BofA had decided that the way I was withdrawing funds was "unusual," based on some algorithm they had created. I could understand that, but the problem was that I'd been withdrawing money the same way for - let's see - about two years.

And how did I discover this new algorithm? You guessed it: when I went to use my debit card on my way to the airport. Luckily, I had another bank card I could use.

Why write about this now? Two reasons. First, I read this article by Paul Gillen over on B To B Online a few days ago.

But what tipped me over was my friend battling with her bank, Washington Mutual, for six days. In her case, she was battling over thousands of dollars, and a frozen account. In the end, after several horrid phone conversations, in desperation she went into a branch. That worked, and the "very nice young man" even followed up the next day with her.

Wow.

So how do we rate something like this? Was WaMu successful or not? In my case, I don't know what worked: I both called and went into the bank, but didn't see results until weeks later. In fact, I was considering changing banks, but what a hassle - and this, I think, is what banks have working for them that allows such awful, uncaring service to exist. Changing banks can be just a pain. So I waited and waited to see if the situation would continue, and lucky for me, it was magically fixed.

Banks also have this whole mysticism thing going on: who knows how they operate? I was told there's an algorithm - does that mean suddenly there wasn't? Did they change it? Or do I have a special notation on my account, allowing the alg-y thing to be bypassed? Who knows, so how can I compete?

My friend was given 3 different reasons why the problem was occurring and 3 different ways to correct it - but nothing appeared to work until she presented herself front and center. In the end, it was the bank's error - to which they never admitted. In her case, I guess you could call it mumbo-jumbo instead of mystical stuff.

The upshot is that banks really need to do a better job. Indeed, given that they are responsible for such an important part of all of our lives, you'd think they'd actually give a hoot.

So what can all of us do about this? You got it: blog, baby, blog. Follow Paul's lead.