Ivygirl Media & Design

Does Your Service Suck?

Sometimes, its the little things that make the difference and when you’re talking about standing out amidst the zillions of other web sites out there, that statement couldn’t be more true.

I’m not sure how it happened but somehow, somewhere, we turned our back on service. And I mean the good old fashioned kind of service where customers were valued and loyalty was forged.

Case in point: a certain web hosting company, which shall remain nameless hosts a shopping cart for one of my customers. They’ve had an ongoing issue with their MySQL database but for some reason, they don’t seem to want to acknowledge it. I’ll skip all the technical details but in short, it doesn’t work properly. It isn’t talking to the open source software it installs and it isn’t creating users to set permissions to the account.

The result? The shopping cart, blog or other OS application doesn’t work. And I’m beating my head against a brick wall to get it fixed.

Example #2: I recently decided to shop my health insurance and applied with Aetna. The initial online quote through one of those insurance sites was amazingly low so I decided to formally apply, with no obligation to buy. It took them a while to get through the underwriting process and in the meantime, I’m still paying for my current plan. About mid-month, I receive a letter that they’ve accepted me but the quote is no where near what was originally indicated. And okay… that’s their right. But I didn’t have a chance to say yes or no to the quote. By the time I received the letter, they had already processed the EFT to debit my account. When I called to complain and ask for my money back, I was told that it takes 7 to 10 business days to process a refund. I did finally get my money back and no, I didn’t have to wait the 7 to 10 days, but it took quite a few hours hours on the phone trying to resolve the situation.

Obviously, I could keep going but my personal rants aren’t the point: service is.

In Seth Godin’s The Big Moo, he writes about the need to become remarkable if you want to succeed. But let’s be honest: unless you’ve got an innovative idea that’s never been done before, being remarkable isn’t quite so easy to do. And that’s where service comes in.

Because despite the big corporate idea that one customer’s dissatisfaction won’t affect their millions, one customer is really all it takes. Don’t think for a moment that your other customers aren’t getting treated as poorly as the one who bothered to complain – you just won’t hear about it because they’ve moved on to someone else.

And in our virtual world of online business, service becomes all the more important since you don’t have a way to physically shake your customer’s hand and give them that personal one-on-one treatment. Instead, your service has to come through your site and if your user is bogged down with popups, slow-loading pages and an obnoxious navigation menu, then your service sucks.

And your customer is clicking away as we speak.