It’s a simple request but if you are in business please can you make sure that you can be contacted by phone. I know that these days we are all in a drive to improve efficiency and customer contact is often seen as a cost rather than a benefit but let me tell you, without customers you don’t have a business. Make it difficult for customers to contact you and they will go elsewhere.
Three times this week I have been faced with this issue, one a shirt printer, two a government body and three a national media company.
The first was an attempt to expedite an order which was now three weeks overdue. I mailed them without success on several occasions and in the end tried to ring them. All I got, once I found a number (not without difficulty), was an answer phone telling me to email them. So I did, I emailed the person who I originally placed the order with, I mailed their customer service and filled in a form on the website all asking the same thing, where is my order. I still haven’t heard from them yet miraculously my order arrived a day later. I will think twice before using them again.
The second was a government body which had a number on the website. A good start except that nobody answers it. After a while a voice comes on the line to say to leave a message and someone will get back to me. I did and they haven’t. I have little choice not to contact them again in future however.
Thirdly was a problem over my broadband, or rather lack of it. Sure enough I could ring the company after trying the online chat bot, only to be faced with a string of automated questions only to be told by a machine that there wasn’t a problem. After a fifteen minute wait on the phone I was advised, by a person, that there was indeed a known outage and my broadband would be back up in a couple of hours. This happened twice the same day. The people I spoke to were good yet the automated responses were unhelpful, wrong and did nothing but make me annoyed. I will seriously consider moving when the time comes, not that the others are any better.
Instead, If I had had a number to ring and somebody answered it who could help me with my issue, life would have been much simpler. I would have been happier with the company and the response that I got. Automated responses or getting rid of your phone may seem like a cost saving exercise but all it does is cause frustration with your clients. This is never a good thing.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 