…and few of them are good.
I recently approached Ryanair’s “bag drop” desk at Stansted Airport just before the flight closed. They took my bag and paperwork and asked for my passport. As I bent down to retrieve my passport from my bag they closed the flight with no apologies and no respect for me as a customer or even as a fellow human being. The decision cost me £100 and resulted in me spending an extra five hours in Stansted Airport. But what was worse was the “I don’t care” attitude displayed by the Ryanair staff at the airport. I felt completely devalued as a customer.
Ryanair would no doubt claim that they have processes to follow, timetables to meet, costs to minimise and “what do you expect for a £19.99 flight?” (although with all their extra charges my flight costs were considerably more than first advertised). My response is that I still expect to be treated with respect.
Thankfully, gem’s experience as a contact centre indicates that most other companies do respect their customers.
Customers want good value and a good customer experience, they want you to empathise with their problems, they want you to provide them with solutions, in many cases they want to interact with a real human being (especially where the problem is complex or urgent or emotive) and they want to be treated with respect. And if they don’t get the right customer experience they will leave – a recent YouGov service stated that 61% of customers will abandon a purchase if the service is less than satisfactory and an Accenture survey this year showed that 20% of customers will immediately leave a company on receiving a poor customer experience.
gem’s corporate clients understand this and recognise that delivering a good customer experience and building customer loyalty is vital to their long-term success. They also care about what their customers say, both directly via e-mail or voice and indirectly through community blogs and support sites which is why gem spend a lot of time gathering customer intelligence for our clients, analysing it for patterns and trends and using it to suggest improvements to our client’s services and products as well as improving how we support their customers. gem care about our customers and our clients care about their customers.
Ryanair is not one of our clients.