It seems that I have, at some time in the recent past, brought myself to the attention of that imp of that controls the quality of customer service and have been blessed with an odd assortment of well-intentioned, but altogether hideous encounters with those call center denizens relegated to direct consumer contact. Now, please don’t get me wrong, I have great respect for those whose job it is to m interact with the likes of me when, through no fault of theirs, a product goes south. It has to be one of the world’s greatest thankless tasks – when it goes right, no one notices and when it goes completely catawampus the complaints fall like rain from the sky.

Act 1: 

First, let me be honest, I abhor PayPal – it is a visceral thing with no logical explanation, no reality-based justification, and does not stem from any fault of the service itself – and tend to use it only when circumstances force it upon me. Then only regular use I have for it is to pay for a single annual subscription to an on-line service. This means that I typically access PayPal once every year or two. It also means that whatever familiarity I had with the user interface is guaranteed to be out of date and completely inaccurate. While I got though my biannual task some imp lurking somewhere between my desktop and PayPal’s servers inserted the notion that I had some interested in merchant services. Now, I do have to give the sales folk credit for their follow-up and their tenacity – e-mails inquiries were closely followed by phone calls 5 minutes later. It was only by sheer happenstance that my schedule had me out of the office (the contact pattern was e-mail, phone call, wait 48 hours, repeat) during the sales contact 3-peat cycle. By the end of the entire debacle, I had a mild twinge of regret when I received the e-mail telling me that I was being removed from the salesman’s contact list.

Act 2: 

For some reason, I’ve been getting calls from salesfolk who feel that it is necessary to be less than honest in their intentions to get past my receptionist and voicemail – a tactic that has me wasting time scanning caller id and googling unfamiliar area codes each time an unknown caller opens a conversation with “I’d like to discuss a possible [fill in practice area here] matter with you”; a tactic that seems to have been pioneered by a few legal referral services but that has now been picked up, by all groups, Mediate.com – a mediator referral source. It seems strange that a referral service for  mediators (a group that tends to want to create trusting environments) should choose deceit as it’s opening gambit.

Act 3: 

Now, I will admit a fondness for freebies and was intrigued by the Dan Kennedy/GKIC offer of free marketing information. After entering an e-mail address in the appropriate place, I was redirected to a web page where I could claim my “free” information for only $19.99 (shipping and handling). Not having sufficient interest in the material to invest just south of $20 in the “free” package I left the page and headed out to greener pastures. Again, I will give the GKIC auto-responder kudos for follow-up; it has diligently been sending me various daily e-mails explaining exactly why I should invest a measly $20 for this wonderful “free” gift.

Lessons

From a distance, I can get a chuckle from my recent customer service debacles – it is amazing how time can turn annoyance into perspective. And with perspective, comes the basic reminder that a quality customer experience does not come from the end product, but from the entire interaction. I should point out that, with the possible exception of Act 2, my annoyance arose not from poor service, but from over-zealous service; after all, the lack of follow-up is the leading cause of lost sales though I think that there is supposed to be some delay between contacts (there’s constant contact and then there’s CONSTANT contact). So, I have to thank the various actors for reminding me:

• To listen to the customer – understanding is far more difficult and far more valuable than simply hearing;
• Be up front with the customer and set the correct expectations; and
• While follow-up is good, there are fine line between follow-up, too much follow-up, and stalking;