5 Tips for Better Tech Customer Service

Recently just made trips to 2 different customer service centers to fix a printer and a laptop. Both were pretty big names in the industry but I don’t think that they were doing the best for the customer yet. Without going into a lengthy tirade on what they handled not so well, I kind of have a couple of ideas from the customer perspective, so all you Customer Service Execs from IT Firms listen up:

1. We need our tech toys – Let’s face it, a lot of technological stuff we use these days are pretty important to our daily work and lives. We increasingly spend more and more time and bank it on it work fine, and that explains our distress (to put it lightly) when they fail catastrophically on it. Having said so, it is amazing how many companies feel it is ok for you to not to have a replacement machine while they wait for weeks for a replacement part to arrive (bad supply chain management or just too much paperwork?)
2. We treasure our time a lot – The worst thing you can do to someone already losing productivity over an unforeseen device crash is to insist that they make more trips then necessary for what may be a simple repair. Especially when your customer service centre is tucked away in some remote industrial park. Why not quickly fix jobs which can be handled on the spot? This problem probably arises because the customer service officer at the front desk isn’t sure how long it takes to fix it and artificially extends the repair time provide more breathing space. How about just pushing the tech guys who actually fix the gadget to the front desk? Which brings me to the next point
3. We don’t like the blame game – How often have you had blame for the delays on your equipment repair pushed from the customer service officer to generic tech guy #1 to generic tech #2 to shipping delays? Why wouldn’t someone just be accountable for a particular job and take it through all the way? I’m sure I would love to have more pro-active repair folks updating me on the status of my repairs rather than myself having to call in to check on it all the time.
4. We love discounts that make sense – When lower value items like printers die off, most of the time, repair costs are pretty high as compared to getting another printer. Instead of pushing the repair job to the back, why not try a bit of cross selling? I’m sure a trade-in discount that brings the latest $600 printer down to $550 would look better than waiting a week to fix the old one for $400. On the plus side, the trade-in printer can then be cannibalized for spare repair parts too.
5. We want to know what’s wrong – Often, once you send a broken tech toy in, you got to wait for a couple of weeks for the tech guy to do his magic before seeing it again. Most consumers may be fine with this but how about simple repairs? Perhaps the tech guy can walk the customer through how to fix it himself? Though not all customers may appreciate this, why not make it interesting for those who want to learn? The best part is that these folks would appreciate the transparency and also know what the do when the same problem comes up again.

Lets face it, the harder customer service works, the less customers should be coming back. They should be the only department whose success metric is based on how fast they get rid of clients.

So there.