The Cancellation Department
December 15, 2009
Technology can be extremely useful when it works. But even when it works well, poor customer service and technical support can make matters extremely difficult.
My cell phone is a both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because I travel extensively and it allows me to keep in touch with my office, my clients, and my family. It’s a curse, because inconsistent service, incorrect information, and regular billing errors have caused me to spend about each month on the phone with their customer service department.
Those of you who have attended my programs know which company I use, although I have heard very similar stories from customers of virtually every carrier.
Last month, I was trying to correct a $600 overcharge on my bill. It was fairly late, maybe 10:30 pm when I tried to contact a customer service representative. Fed up with spending ten minutes trying to navigate their “automated assistant,” I hit a random sequence of keys to confuse the system and get routed to an actual person. In a few seconds, I was on the phone with a customer service representative.
But not just any person, I got “Dave,” who was by far the most competent employee of this particular company I had ever spoken with.
He corrected the problem with the bill and explained why the problem had happened. He told me about an issue they were having that made it impossible to accurately post my usage to the web site so that I could manage my minutes. He made a note to follow up with me in a few weeks to make sure everything was working correctly.
Oh yeah, he also recommended a different plan that offered me more minutes at a lower cost than I was paying. I thought I had died and gone to “Customer Service Heaven,” which anyone who knows me will tell you is high praise indeed!
I asked Dave how I was lucky enough to have him as my customer service representative and his answer was quite interesting. ”I don’t work in Customer Service,” he explained, “I work in the Cancellation Department. When people decide to cancel their service, they are sent to me and I do whatever is necessary to keep them with us.”
Now clearly, they had the right person in that job, but I couldn’t help but think that if they had competent people like this answering the phones in the first place, they wouldn’t even need a Cancellation Department!
Study after study has shown that it is more costly to get a new customer than it is to keep the customer you already have. Keep this in mind and be certain that you give the best possible service you can when it really counts – at the moment the problem arises.
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