Customer Service: Less is Not More
January 27, 2012 Leave a Comment
I was reading an article posted on Techdirt about the SOPA/PIPA legislation that was just recently shelved. The article, which can be found here, is about how the gaming companies are supporting the bill even though the gamers (according to the article) are not. To sum it up, one gamer sent a letter to SEGA asking them to oppose the legislation and got the following in response:
“Generally these issues are caused by bad installs or junk data that’s stuck in the system memory. The first suggestion would be to perform a hard reset on the device. It’s best to attempt this any time you experience performance problems with your device or have an app crash. If it doesn’t work, its suggested that you uninstall the app, perform a hard reset, reinstall and then perform one more hard reset before launching the game.
“If you’re problems continue, please let us know.”
Now if you’re like me, your response upon reading this was “that’s about as expected from a big corporation.”
Wait, what?
Why is that the first thing we think of when we think of customer service these days? With companies clamoring all over social media to develop relationships in order to gain our business, why are they using prefab responses to our actual needs to keep us as customers? Fortunately, some people at SEGA agreed and posted the video below in response when they learned of their error.
While the video isn’t all that funny and way too long, it does illustrate how handling something with human interaction is always a better way to handle anything. This video was disarming in how they handled the situation because it showed they listened to the problem, put some thought into it, and then gave a human response. The fact that it had a bit of self-deprecating humor helped but wasn’t really necessary.
Think of how that stacks up against their canned response up top, (and let’s even pretend it was the right canned response). Which would you rather get back from a company? Which one would make you think the company cares about you and deserves your business again? Now as Patton once stated, “A gallon of sweat saves a pint of blood.” Put a gallon of effort in how you handle customers’ questions and complaints from the beginning, and you will save yourself a pint of profits at the end.
