As a consumer, I recently experienced the pain of attempting to get support from several vendors. I am shocked by how bad customer access to support has become.
Let me start with a positive experience. I had a fitness/health tracker that stopped working. Although they had no live agents, and I could not speak directly with anyone, I was able to chat with the vendor’s online AI support bot. The bot was friendly and efficient, and after a few questions it decided to ship me a new device. No human intervention needed. The new device showed up in a few days—Magic. It turned out that the new device did not initially seem to be tracking my activities accurately, so I reconnected with the friendly AI bot, and in about three minutes it decided to ship me another new device with no requirement to return the prior device. Good news for me as the consumer; not so good for the vendor. I later discovered that a new tracker requires some time and experience to get to know and track my activities, and after a week or two it was performing accurately. The bot failed to recognize the need for a training period and assumed the first replacement was defective, when it was just in a learning phase. I ended up with two devices, and the vendor was out one extra device due to the bot being overzealous in its effort to make me happy. Not great, but the result was a happy customer.
This vendor eliminated human support and managed to be fairly effective at providing a satisfactory customer service experience. However, almost every other vendor on the planet that has eliminated human support or imposed extensive chat-bot roadblocks has failed horribly at maintaining a positive experience. Further, most automated systems are designed to do everything possible to prevent access to a human support person, and when they finally surrender and pass the contact to a human, the call centers are often so understaffed that the additional wait time is maddeningly long.
My most recent horror story was a problem attempting to login to my bank’s portal. The login kept rejecting my credentials, and eventually instructed me to contact support via phone. The call was answered by a bot that insisted on trying to validate the same credentials that had failed on the website, eventually telling me it could not find any accounts associated with me. Imagine my panic that someone had stolen my money and closed my accounts. The bot tried really hard to block access to an agent, but eventually directed the call to a call center. Unfortunately, after 14 minutes on hold, the agent informed me it was the wrong call center and passed me to a different part of the financial institution. After another fifty minutes of waiting (with no offer to preserve my spot in line and call me back), the second agent informed me that all of their systems were “having an issue” and were “undergoing maintenance with no stated completion time” and I should “call back later or tomorrow.” Aside from the panic that triggered regarding my assets, my reaction was anger that I had invested over one hour on hold when they could have put that message on the website, informed the bot, and told me at the start of the call. It would have saved me an hour and would have saved the vendor from requiring an agent to speak with me just to say she could not help me.
In the interest of reducing call volumes and eliminating human costs, too many companies have gone off the deep-end, resulting in customer service turning into customer disservice. They have turned an opportunity for customer satisfaction and loyalty into an engine of dissatisfaction and churn. The problem is that they view customer service as a cost center and a burden instead of viewing it as an opportunity center. Somehow they think investing less in customer service will not have an impact on customer satisfaction or loyalty. You cannot cut your way to customer satisfaction.
Progressive companies recognize that customer interactions are opportunities. Building an understanding of how customers think, how they work, and what they value provides valuable insight. Interacting with customers opens the door to educate and potentially upsell, or at least reduce churn. The concept of ‘Product Led Growth’ is predicated on customers telling vendors what they want, leading to greater product/market fit and growth.
The argument that it costs too much to support customers is really just an indictment of the vendor’s goods and services. It says the goods and services are so confusing or so problematic that customers need excessive support and hand-holding, but instead, most vendors focus on the increasing support costs instead of looking at what is causing the support calls. One technology vendor was smart enough to see this feedback loop as an opportunity to improve their products. They created a cultural philosophy that said if a customer has to contact us, it is because of a bug in our offering and we need to solve for how to avoid the call in the future. Every customer inquiry was then baked into either a product change or a tutorial or a help topic or specific training for an AI bot. Their goal was to make customers 100% self-sufficient, and eliminate any need to contact the vendor. They were not trying to minimize the cost of support. Instead, they were trying to maximize the value of their products. Think about how how different that approach is. They invested in customer support as a way to improve their offering, rather than as a burden. They used the feedback to make the products easier to use. At the same time they were building a delighted loyal customer base. The vendor’s support costs went down, but not because they cut services. They declined because they used customer input to deliver products that no longer required as much support.
Most companies have lost sight of just how bad their customer support is. When a support line answers the phone with “due to high volume, wait times may be long…” you are dealing with a company that is more focused on their bottom line than they are on providing excellent service. When you reach a bot that has a limited set of options and traps you in an endless loop while refusing to pass you along to a human agent, it tells you that this vendor is trying to hide from supporting you. They took your money for the goods or services you purchased, but in their calculus, you did not pay enough for them to provide the support you need. In essence, they are saying that they do not value you as a customer beyond your initial purchase.
Rethinking customer support as creating an opportunity instead of a burden should be in the mind of every vendor. In a time when competitive moats are shrinking due to AI-driven rapid competitive development, a vendor’s reputation is increasingly becoming one of the few defensible reasons to remain a customer. Why squander that opportunity by treating customer interactions as a cost? It may be your best path to building a lasting relationship with buyers.