Customer Service Problems and Trends

What do the words Customer Service mean to you? Does it mean that if you have a problem or a question about a good or service, you can contact these people and they will help you? Or does it mean that if you have a problem or a question about a good or service you can call these people to get even more frustrated? More and more it is looking to be the latter of those two statements. Some places still have stellar customer service, but these places are becoming endangered species. All of this brings up a really good question: Are we really being served?

One common complaint with Customer Service Departments is that so many of them are outsourced to non English speaking countries. Outsourcing saves the company money, but it forces the customers to deal with people who may not speak English well (or in some cases at all). When you are already frustrated and upset, the last thing you want is to struggle to speak and understand the person trying to help you.

AOL is a major offender in this category. When you are having technical issues with your computer, and the guy on the other end of the phone is so unintelligible you have to ask him to repeat himself several times, this is not a good thing. Things are made worse when the tech rep gets angry with you for not being able to understand him, and then he suddenly turns rude.

Another issue that plagues companies with stateside Customer Service Departments is that they do not pay well. If you are barely paying an employee enough to keep them above the poverty line, you are not going to attract high quality personnel. Granted there are some very nice, very qualified, and under paid reps out there. However, usually even those people do not stay long. They stay until a better paying job comes along and then they are gone.   Pretty soon the department becomes a rotating door of mixed quality employees.