I don’t know if anyone else saw the research conducted for Kana Software which found that almost one-third (30%) of UK consumers had become less loyal to retail brands in the past five years, and that a quarter of them blamed poor customer service for their disillusion.
My rusty maths tells me that a quarter of 30% is 7.5% of the overall total. Some people might wonder whether the fact 7.5% of all customers have become less loyal to a retail brand because of poor service is worthy of all the fuss but those people would not include quite a number of Web-based news outlets.
In any case, I suppose no company wants to lose any customers because of problems with something that could (and should) be a significant part of their daily operation. Poor or unsatisfactory service is also something that doesn’t just put off existing customers, it can also be amplified by word of mouth to deter potential future customers.
Anyway, one of the major irritations for those complaining of poor service was the number of times they had to repeat their complaint to different people in the same company. Almost half of them (3.75% of the total customers surveyed) complained they had to repeat information during their last communication with a retailer.
We’ve all been there. Indeed, with some companies, it almost appears to be part of the strategy to turn their customers into demented, twitching zombies endlessly choosing options that put them through to even more options.
What interested me was the wide disparity between the experience of older customers (those aged 65 and older) and those under the age of 35. One in 20 of the under 35s reported they had been forced to repeat themselves at least five times and only 30% had their problem resolved after one interaction. By contrast, nearly two-thirds (64%) of over 65s did not have to repeat themselves at all.
Expectations
Steven Thurlow, head of worldwide product strategy for KANA, said forcing customers to repeat themselves demonstrated “poor management of customer data, channels and context” and accused companies of “a lack of ownership of the consumer’s problem and lack of appreciation for their effort levels”.
All of which may be true but I’m not sure I agree with his argument as to why younger people were having more issues about having to repeat themselves. “The younger generation has higher expectations of digital channels, collaborative and social communications,” he claimed, “and asks ‘how hard can it be’. They won’t take seriously an organisation that is unable to do the basics right, and these expectations are rising all the time.”
Even if all of what he says is true and I’m not completely convinced, I wonder if there might gbe a far more prosaic reason as to why the over 65s rarely have to repeat themselves while so many more of the younger generation has to. It’s got very little, if anything, to do with technological awareness or customer expectation and far more to do with something that has been a bug-bear of the older generation about the younger generation since the 1960s. In a word: diction.
Young people tend to mumble, older people don’t. Thurlow is right that “repetition causes frustration and makes customers feel devalued or, worse, completely ignored” but it’s hard not to feel some sympathy with the customer service operative forced to ask a mumbling twenty- or thirty-something to repeat themselves because it is so hard to distinguish what they are saying.
With older people, I suspect the reverse is true, especially if they have hearing difficulties and need the customer service operative to repeat himself or herself because they didn’t hear everything he or she said the first time around. Which leads me to wonder if a survey done the other way around (ie of people in customer service and their interaction with customers) might produce results that are the complete opposite of the KANA one.
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