It all happens in a matter of seconds.
One minute, I’m a happy customer, calling in with a question. The next, I’m frustrated and annoyed, ready to ditch your service altogether.
It goes something like this:
*Phone ringing*
*Click*
Thank you for calling X business. Please press one, two, three, four, or five, and we will connect you with another computer that can’t respond to your needs or answer your questions.
*Caller fruitlessly shouts, “Representative!” into the handset, hoping that this recording is voice-activated*
But it isn’t, so after waiting through multiple levels of automated menus, the caller finally speaks to a real person, who isn’t in the right department to answer his questions and instead transfers the caller to another line, at which time the waiting process starts all over again.
We have all experienced the agonizing frustration of automated telephones, yet plenty of companies still insist on using these computerized gatekeepers that waste their customer’s time and have them fuming by the time they get a real customer service rep on the phone.
The funny thing is, I can always get someone to answer the phone if I dial the sales department. The sales team is more than happy to put real people on the phone if they think they’re going to make a new customer out of it.
This logic is flawed, however. Investing in having an amazing sales team while letting your current, loyal customers suffer through an automated telephone service is just wrong. If you don’t take care of the customers you have, you will spend all your resources trying to create new customers because the ones you have are too frustrated to continue using your service or product. And it’s been proven, time and time again, that it costs far more to acquire a new customer than it does to keep an old one happy.
Automated telephone services are the silent killer that may be ruining your business.
Why silent? Because if you don’t hear your customers in their time of need, then you won’t hear them as they silently, one by one, desert your business forever.
Take care of your customers like they are your biggest fans, because in the long run, they are the only reason you still have a business.
As a speaker and author, Curtis Zimmerman has impacted over one million people with his life-changing messages and award-winning programs. Curtis is an expert at transforming organizations by inspiring individuals to live their lives at performance level.
Want to be inspired? Check out his podcast The Next 24 Hours.
