The little things that destroy your customer experience

As a way of celebrating International Darwin Day on Feb 12th, MyCustomer.com published an article: Making a Charlie of themselves: The Darwin Awards for customer service. The article is pretty tongue-in-cheek but aims to showcase, in a light-hearted way, some of the biggest customer service failures of our time.

Now, there is no doubt that some of the stories are funny and, I hope, we can all learn from our own failures and those of others. However, I do believe that we, as people, do have a tendency to focus on just the big things, i.e. the big things to avoid, the next big thing, the big ways to win, etc., etc.

But, this focus on big things means that we often miss, or don’t focus on, the lots of little things that in themselves can have a significant, but not obvious, impact on our businesses. These little things, if not addressed, can add up and together pose serious problems for our businesses and the customer experiences that we are delivering.

I’ve written about something similar before in: Removing The ‘Grit’ From Your Customer Or Client Experience. But today I thought I’d take a different tack and share a list of some of the little things – my own personal gripes, or bits of ‘grit’, if you like – that I have come across lately that, I think, go a long away to destroying, or negatively affecting, the customer experience.

Here’s my list (in no particular order):

The time it takes to navigate an IVR;
The waiting time to speak to an agent or sales rep;
When an agent cannot answer my question;
When my question via email or social media doesn’t get a response, never mind an answer;
Not being able to find a number to call the customer service department;
But I realise that different firms do things in different ways, so if I can’t call you then say so and say why. I might be annoyed but I’ll get over it if service in your other channels delivers;
Calling your reception and the person on the other end of the phone sounds ‘flat’ or isn’t very helpful;
When new customers get better deals than existing customers;
When everyone in your shop is too busy doing ‘other’ stuff to serve customers, especially when they want to pay;
When you don’t do what you said you were going to do when you said you were going to do it;
When things are added to the overall bill that are either a surprise or weren’t explained;
When a delivery or service person turns up late and hasn’t phoned/texted/emailed ahead to explain that they are running late;
When you don’t say sorry if you make a mistake;
When I try to do something on your website and you point me to a broken link or a page that doesn’t exist;
When I leave a message for you to call me and then either a. you don’t call me back; or b. you send me an email in reply (are you afraid to talk to me?);
When you bombard me with surveys asking for feedback;
But whenever I’ve ever given feedback, you’ve never told me what you’ve done with it;
When you use language that I don’t understand or makes me feel stupid;
When you automatically add me to your marketing email list;
When I try to unsubscribe from your marketing emails and you: a. either make it hard for me to do so; or b. you don’t remove me from your list immediately;
When you leave a message for me to call you, I call you back on the number you have given me and: a. you make me go through your IVR again; and b. you have no record or memory of leaving me a message or why you called in the first place.

I recognise that this list may be very personal and a bit random and some of these will and will not be relevant to you. However, I hope that you get the point and see that these are only some of the little things that could be affecting your own customer experience. I also hope that you recognise that finding and fixing your ‘little things’ could go a long way to helping you achieve those customer experience improvements that you want to make.

As the great basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar once said:

“I try to do the right thing at the right time. They may just be little things, but usually they make the difference between winning and losing.”

This post originally appeared on my Forbes column. Since then I have published it on a number of LinkedIn groups asking people to give their own examples of ‘little things’ and have received somewhere between 30 and 40 additional responses. In the near future, I will publish an updated version of this list to include these comments.

In the meantime, feel free to add your own little things to this list in the comments below.

Author: Guest Author

Published On: 26th Mar 2014 - Last modified: 6th Feb 2019
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