Is Your Customer Service Team Creative?

I had an interesting experience the other day with a customer service team at a certain “Web events and online meetings” company. I was attempting to make it so that we could use VoIP and our regular call in conference call line simultaneously for our weekly webinars. After trying to hack the email that has the webinar info in it for a half hour to no avail, I decided to call in and see if their support had any helpful hints.

So I called in and found out that apparently it’s “impossible” to use both and I had to choose one or the other. It hardly seemed fair to me that we couldn’t use both at the same time, when you can use their conference call line and VoIP at the same time. Which, I mean, we could use their conference call line, but it changes for every webinar and that just gets annoying, but I digress…

The real thing that irked me about the whole situation was how I was treated over the phone. First, I waited on hold for about 10 minutes (which wasn’t that big of a deal — time to catch up on emails!), but then when I was finally able to talk to someone, the girl talked to me for about 30 seconds, told me what I wanted wasn’t possible, and then hung up.

I don’t know about you, but that really left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I think I’ve grown so accustomed to what it’s like here (where our customer support team tries to help in any way they can imagine) that I kind of expect it from everyone I deal with in the outside world.

The girl that I talked to didn’t even think twice about my question. I mean, couldn’t she have thought of a work around or something?!?! Where was their creativity?? Where was my Mario, Marybeth, or Jonathan on the other end of the line?? I mean, couldn’t she at least think about how we could do some type of hack to get the system to work the way I wanted it to? It’s just a silly email invite that is automatically sent once someone signs up for the webinars — there’s got to be some way to change it. And not just say “No” and hang up.

Anyways, what I have realized is how much I really appreciate the creativeness of our customer support team and how much they actually do care about helping you with your problems. You can always tell when someone really enjoys what they are doing and is trying to help versus just giving you a “no” and hanging up on you. Not cool “Web events and online meetings” company — not cool!

OK, that’s the end of my rant about customer service for the day.

Wanted to give a shout out to all our Account Managers here — you guys rock! Keep helping everyone out the best you can, because trust me, the person on the other end of the phone really appreciates it!

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