Let’s Hear It For Customer Service

Just the other day I had an interesting encounter with the customer service people of my cell phone carrier. I had some technical difficulties with my phone and they had to give me a new one. I had downloaded a few songs and games and had asked the technician what I could do about that. He told me to give him about 5 minutes and call customer service and they would credit my account. So I waited a little longer and then called. The first person I talked to told me he didn’t know what the person in the store had told me but he was wrong.

At first I just wanted to leave it at that but then I remembered that the Wheel of Fortune game gets charged each month and I can’t play it anymore so I called customer service again. Funny, the lady I got this time told me that I can be credited for the downloads. I said well why did the other guy tell me I couldn’t? She just replied I got a different call center. So I hung up the phone with credit, but I still don’t know why I had to call again to get the correct response! This is very frustrating. Now if I could change cell phone companies I would. Just because of the misinformation I received, but I cannot as I’m locked in for another year and a half!

What I have learned from this experience is that the information we give needs to be the same across the board. If a customer calls in for a self storage unit and we tell them everything they need to know, then they should be able to go into the store and purchase that unit the way it was described over the phone. If the store has spoken with the customer and then we tell them something else we look as if we don’t know what we are doing! So we have always had the policy in place to be thorough on each of our calls to be sure we give the correct information. When a customer is not told everything on the first call it may make it harder to obtain that sale because of misinformation.