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Richard: For this week's podcastsinenglish.com business podcast we’re talking about customer service.
Jackie: Yes, and the reason for that is because there’s an amusing story in the newspapers at the moment about customer service. A man went home having bought some sandwiches from Marks and Spencer’s department store and realised he’d been overcharged £1.10. He wrote to their customer services department and in response they offered him a £5 voucher. When the voucher didn’t arrive the man wrote another letter and said forget the voucher, what I really want is a member of your staff to do me a drawing of a smiling dinosaur. And to his surprise he got both the voucher and a drawing of a smiling dinosaur.
Richard: So excellent customer service.
Jackie: For him he said this was the best customer service he has ever seen and, of course, good PR for Marks and Spencer’s.
Richard: Yes, but as we are an online business we’re going to look at online customer service this week, aren’t we?
Jackie: Yes, let’s start with some good examples, Richard.
Richard: Well, I think basic good customer service is if the service the company provides is excellent. We deal with Amazon and basically the website works, it’s very simple, we get things we buy so that’s excellent customer service cos it just works.
Jackie: Right, we haven’t always been so pleased though with online companies, have we?
Richard: No, we er… have dealt with Google in the past, they make it very difficult to contact them for anything so that’s one um… bad example for us anyway. And also, obviously, we deal with PayPal. Now PayPal’s a very good service, we use that for our… for our podcasting site, usually excellent but we’ve had some technical issues and the main problem there is that people we’ve dealt with haven’t been technically proficient and that… that’s a problem if the person doesn’t know how to solve the problem.
Jackie: Mm, it’s interesting isn’t it, because people often only associate customer service when things go wrong, don’t they, and so if they want to make a complaint it’s really important to have channels of communication.
Richard: Yes, another example is our… our web host we use…
Jackie: No but that’s a good example.
Richard: Exactly, they have lots of channels of communication. You can telephone them, which is excellent, you can also email them. Also it’s web chat I found very good and you can actually chat um… with a person in real time to solve the problem.
Jackie: Now I think um… one of the benefits about the… the… the web chat is a) you don’t have to pay for the phone call but b) you’re actually dealing with a real person at the other end.
Richard: Yes, I mean that’s the problem a lot of companies… you’re… they’re online but they often want you to telephone them to sort your problem out and obviously everybody’s experienced that long wait while you wait for an operator and increasingly nowadays you’re telephoning internationally so you can’t wait for a long time to get your problem sorted out.
Jackie: I think a lot of people, despite those problems, they do actually prefer, even though they’re dealing with an online company, if there’s a problem people do like to have [an] offline solution um… and the telephone… you… you want to speak to a real person so again I think the web chat it deals with that, doesn’t it.
Richard: Yes, excellent. And of course the other major channel of communication even in this modern inter-connected world is of course by writing a letter so companies should put their physical address [on their website].
Jackie: The postal address.
Richard: Exactly
Jackie: So that you can write and complain and get a picture of a smiling dinosaur.
Richard: Mmm
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