If the Shoe Fits: Internet Arrogance and Customer Service
by Miki Saxon
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here
If your business provides a service over the Internet what value do you place on customer service?
An article about Hyatt CEO Mark Hoplamazian’s approach to employees and customer service (shades of Tony Hsieh) as a non-product business got me thinking.
Internet companies aren’t known for great customer service—they’re known for not having any.
The only way to reach most of them is by email or their contact form.
Assuming you actually get a response, it’s most often a form note that sends you to Help; Facebook even claims people prefer that approach.
Mr. Wolens said that Facebook believes that its users prefer “self-remediation” — basically, online solutions they find without help — to dealing with Facebook employees.
Comments like this make me wonder if Internet companes have any understanding of humans at all.
Do they (you?) really believe that the majority of people having problems using a product/service/whatever-you-call-it like digging through crappy descriptions of problems that never quite address theirs?
Enterprise, the car rental company has done a lot of quantitative work on the effect of customer service based on a customer rating system that goes from one to five.
“In my discussion with Enterprise, they said that people who give a ‘five’ are three times more likely to return than those who give a ‘four,’” Hoplamazian noted. “And the people who give a ‘four’ are twice as likely [to come back] than [those who give lower numbers]. Below a ‘four,’ and you might as well forget it. The only thing that matters is customer satisfaction.”
I’ll bet similar stats hold true for Internet companies; not just for returning, but for recommending.
It is too-big-to-fail arrogance, such as you find at Facebook and Google, that result in no customer service.
And that attitude trickles down to the entrepreneurs who emulate them.
(My apologies for not posting yesterday.)
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Flickr image credit: HikingArtist
