Customer Dis-service

From all my years in the world of business the first and most important thing I learned when dealing with any type of customer service question, concern or problem was also to diffuse the situation first by saying to the customer the following words,

"What I can do for you is..."

No matter what follows these words I have already told the customer that I am going to work to solve their problem, I can do it for them and I am listening.

The worst words you can use are,

"What you need to do is..."

No matter how polite you say this, how cute you look the first reaction you will always get is no one tells me what to do when it is your problem to fix.

In the fourth day of my issue with getting blasted with what was originally 47,000 spam emails that capped out at 165,000 I finally found out that no one at http://www.bell.ca/ overseas tech support was actually working to help address my two issues which were clearly stated and read back to me by at least two reps when I followed up after the time frame they had provided.

Issue one was stop the spam.

Issue two was to delete the 165,000 emails.

Turns out from day one there was a note added to the folder saying they could not delete the emails. No one bothered to tell me, they only said "It has been escalated!" The original timeline of 30 minutes became 72 hours. 72 hours was today and I was not letting them off the hook until I got an answer. The first rep I spoke with today said, "I can take care of it". Well the good news is he did delete 25,000 emails for me,I found out later he was deleting them 100 at a time like I am required. I called back tech support 3 hours later and asked why it was taking them so long to delete the emails, I did not know they had to be manually done. The (worst customer service skill deprived) rep simply said after a dramatic pause "You need to do it. I can't" I asked him what are you talking about, the last rep said he could do it easily. He said, "Well he was manually deleting them and I can't do that you need to."

At the point I hung up. If the tech reps from the beginning said we can stop the spam but can not delete the emails, my expectations for the next three days would have been set properly. The problem is the reps I followed up with daily never told me this, they took the simple it is not problem to deal with and said I will put in a special note and escalate it. If they had been honest I would not be so frustrated now that if it was not for the lovely 8 months left on my contract I would be switching Internet service providers.

What can you learn from this?

1) Always tell the customer what you can do for them.

2) Set realistic expectations.

3) Tell the truth no matter how much it hurts.

So any Internet Service providers looking for a new customer in 8 months? Heck offer me a deal so good I can't refuse and I will switch tomorrow. Bell wonders why I switched my phone service, I wondered why for two seconds and realized it was how they treated me.