Your Call Is Important To Us

I work for myself and I think like most people that do so, I work hard to keep my customers not just happy but delighted. No life coach can ever guarantee results anymore than a brain surgeon can promise a patient they will recover from an operation or a movie screen owner can be sure his customers will enjoy a new movie. There is a fine book by Jeffrey Gitomer called Customer Satisfaction is Worthless, Customer Loyalty is Priceless: How to Make Them Love You, Keep You Coming Back, and Tell Everyone They Know” that sums up the ethos that small business owners need to adopt to survive.

So why oh why doesn’t this apply to large companies? Why can they get away with treating their customers like the dirt on their shoes and still be in business? More pertinently how do they continue to get away with lying so blatantly without ever being taken to task?

Here are some of the more common lies that we all have to deal on a daily basis that maybe familiar to you with my interpretation of what they really mean.

“Your call is important to us”

But not important enough that we would think of taking on extra staff to make sure we could actually take it.

“We are experiencing heavier than usual call volumes”

In fact we experience these every day so who knows what ‘usual’ is. The fact is we don’t want to have to employ more people because that would eat into profits

“We cannot come to the phone because we are dealing with other customers”

We maybe actually doing this or we maybe on a conference call in the bathroom, talking about American Idol at the cooler or simply short staffed because employing more people costs money and eats into profits.

Please listen carefully our caller options have recently changed”

We think you are a complete moron and will just hit the same number as last time. Worse still you may even then get through to the right department with that number. Then we wouldn’t have the chance to try and up sell you or get you to go to the web thus saving us some more money because we don’t have to then pay somebody to talk to you.

“Let me put you through to somebody that can help”

Let me cut you off so I don’t have to deal with you.

“We’ll look into it and call you back”

You’ll never hear from us again,

“The self-service checkouts are to serve our customers better”

The self-service checkouts are to save us money because we have to employ less people and the best bit is this: We get the few staff we have now to show you how to do it and then fire them when you know how because we don’t need them any longer!

Turkeys voting for Christmas anybody?

Rant over ;-)

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