What do you tend to do when/if you get rubbish customer service? You switch allegiance as soon as humanly possible, and probably tell your friends.

​ ‘Your message/call is very important to us’

​ ‘We are experiencing a high volume of calls at the moment’

‘Please do not reply to this email – it is not monitored’ (from a donotreply.com email)

‘Please try our new chatbot to help with your enquiry’

And my personal least favourite ‘thank you for your patience’ (please don’t assume I’m being patient as I’m not usually)

Arghhhh

All of the above are extremely irritating and frequent customer experience interactions that do nowt for positive customer relations. And negative customer relations cost a business in more ways than one.

Firstly is the financial cost, and secondly the trust/reputation cost (which is of course also a financial cost).

​When customers experience over complication and/or obfuscation they vote with their feet. They often give up and/or move on. And they frequently make some noise whilst doing so, by sharing their frustration in person to others and/or online to potentially many more via the many online review routes.

These bad reviews are a real reputation cost. What’s that saying about people being quick to criticise and slow to praise?

It is almost always costlier to attract new customers than retain them. Customer churn = ££s cost to a business.

So what can you do instead?

Are you really experiencing a high volume of calls? Or is that your default message for ALL calls? Customers value honesty. I recall hearing something along the lines of ‘we are usually busiest between xx and xx so please try outside of these times’. Honest and helpful rather than a blanket approach.

Is it really good customer service to use a do not reply email? Especially if you don’t offer any other way of getting in touch. What can you do differently? Could you say ‘if you still need to get in touch please do so via xxxx (and make sure the xxxx work!).

Can you explain the type of things your chatbot can help with, ASWELL as those it can’t? It’s very frustrating for customers to have to repeat themselves continually before getting through to a person. I’ve had this recently with Microsoft online. It took a rather long time. I had to keep repeating myself and eventually got a ‘Ah you need to speak to a specialist on this’. Yup, what I asked for an hour or so ago. I’m not sure why it took so long and how that benefits either them or me?

​Don’t send customers round in circles, in a loop of dissatisfaction. I’ve had this with customer service via Twitter (X) DMs. The bot replies can be lengthy and it can mean multiple messages before you get to finally being able to ask your question, which you’ve undoubtedly already asked.

​Cut the jargon. Cut the waffle and don’t use your internal words externally and expect customers to understand them – more on this via my blog post on internal comms v external comms.

Finally, sense check your emails with my Plain English 5-minute test. 

​The Bottom Line

Better customer service comms with clear language = higher customer satisfaction + lower support costs. Why wouldn’t you want to get this right?