Customer Services and why it matters!

Well good morning to you all, it is once again a sunny day in Hertfordshire, the sun is out, the sky is blue but the new paddling pool is still freezing! Not that the kids have noticed, they only come out when we tell them they’ve turned blue. A good mini investment me thinks.

And so on to today’s topic, the topic of Customer Services. I have worked within Customer Services for quite a number of years.  The Customer Services at Collect+ is top notch, the team would do everything they could to solve problems in the quickest time possible. Where a problem could not be solved (genuinely lost parcel) then we would act to rectify the problem by either replacing the product or providing a refund.  Now I’m sure there will be people who disagree with some things, but in general the idea at C+ was that you looked after your customer to the best of your ability.  This even lead to a Christmas presents being delivered by head office staff on Christmas morning on one occasion, to ensure that the customer’s child did not have a ruined Christmas. The ethos behind C+ customer service was that we have a service to provide and will do everything possible to make that happen, and despite the stresses in Head Office when we spoke to the Customer Services team on a daily basis we could be satisfied that we were providing what was expected. So, that comes down to the question of the day, why do the big companies not care?  Let me stop myself there though, because I’m not going to be generic. I’ve had some awesome customer services from Expedia and BA in lockdown, both companies were proactive and took little time to resolve my problem and get me my money back. I didn’t have to chase, I didn’t leave a call wondering if I would ever hear from them again, and when one of the payments didn’t quite make it back to my bank card along with the others, it took another phone call to get that escalated (and to be honest, that was an error from American Airlines rather than BA).

But some customer services department just don’t understand both their customers AND their product or service.  Here’s a little example from an IT company I dealt with in the last week, and now could probably take over their jobs. We won’t mention the name, just that they own most of the items on all our family laptops. They link everything together and own things that you might want to use to write things, or make spreadsheets, or nice little presentations… you get the idea?

So picture this, children are playing Roblox. Molly is playing online and Lucy has it downloaded from the M**** shop.  Both have been really good so after about a year of playing I’m allowing them to buy Robux. Molly goes on to her game, is given options to buy robux, Paypal payment (not my first choice but it worked this time) and it’s on her account. Easy peasy.

Lucy goes into her game, goes to buy Robux and is only given a choice of 80 for 99cents or 800 for $9.99. So we start with 80 because apparently things on Roblox are cheap. Thinking I’ll pay paypal again, imagine my surprise when I’m asked to upload the money to the Microsoft shop. Ok, whatever that’s fine. Hang on a minute, the minimum I can upload is £10 and I’m spending precisely 79p. Ok, then she can have that balance for rewards in the future.  We buy 80 robux, she joins her friends on a paid game. Everyone is happy, see my other blog for allowing them to game when they want. 80 Robux, compared to Molly’s 400 doesn’t last quite as long (bear with me we’re getting there).  Easy solution, I’ve got £9.21 balance I’ll just go in and buy Robux.  BUT, here’s the problem. First of all, Lucy can’t now access Roblox on her laptop, it needs updating but M*** takes up over half the memory on her computer so we don’t have room to download updates. So we play via google like Molly does, but oh no, we can’t buy Robux with Microsoft balance, only paypal or credit card.  First live chat with M*** and two hours later I start typing in CAPITAL LETTERS BECAUSE I’M GETTING A BIT PISSED OFF NOW. We’ve got nowhere, I can see where the problem is but Chuck A (like there is a Chuck B too?) can’t. I’m now saying that poor child would just like a refund to buy robux with on paypal. Not asking for freebies, just asking for the ability to do what we’ve already paid £10 to do.  The best response Chuck came up with was “can you download the game on another device?” What like my work laptop? Er… no thank you. We can play online, we don’t need to download it.

5 hours later, and poor Lucy is a little upset, but still being very patient. I delete everything I can from her laptop and still cannot put an update on Roblox.  I then find my old laptop that takes an hour to boot up. I download roblox on that. I go in to buy robux, it’s asking me for my Microsoft login, I put the details in. it’s asking me to upload money to my account? Say what????  I go back on chat and speak to Adrian M (Adrian T was on another call perhaps). I tell him that if I go into Microsoft store I can only buy Robux for Xbox. We don’t have a live Xbox. He wants me to buy an Xbox and play from that. I ask him what £10 means to M*** compared to what £10 means to an 8 year old little girl. He apologises for his company not being prepared to do anything about it. They’ll get back to me in 24 hours.

Meanwhile, I work out something. If I log out of everything ever, anywhere and log in as Lucy, even though her Microsoft account is linked to my parent account, I can go in to her account and buy Robux. I do this, and destress with a WW dance class, where I pretend I’m Goldie Hawn in Overboard and dance like nobody’s watching, even though there are potentially 200 people watching and I’m sure one is my WW mentor, Stella. Oh well, as long as I can put a smile on some people’s face.

Two days later, I’m still waiting for M*** to get back to me. I’ve solved the problem so I couldn’t care less what they come up with, but I’m fuming that they haven’t bothered to contact me, haven’t tried to solve my problem, really haven’t given a hoot!  At the same time, I ordered something for Molly’s birthday from a small independent company. It’s not arrived and it should have by now. I emailed the company and got a reply within a couple of hours, hugely apologetic and saying if it doesn’t come tomorrow they will send out a new replacement straight away. I love this company already and I’ve not even tried the product yet. I’m sure I’ll blog about it when it eventually comes, and if double arrive I’m sure I’ll send the first lot back or buy the 2^nd.

This is the key thing with customer services. Treat your customers right and you automatically get a little bit of loyalty. Customers want to be treated like customers, like the people who are prepared to give you their hard earned money in return for a good or service. It’s just a shame that the big companies who know that you don’t have a choice, don’t seem to care (although some do, please don’t assume they are all badasses).

I suppose the moral of this blog is to buy from nice people. People who genuinely care about you and want to sell you nice things.  Then give them good feedback and tell your friends and family and hopefully we can increase the love from Customer services and make the world a better shopping place.