I think it's the classic case of "when customers tell you something is broken, they are usually right. When customers tell you WHAT is broken, they are usually wrong".
If I spent enough time before every transaction or interaction I make to ensure I'm fully informed about the product/service, the company providing it, support and other options to remedy a disagreement or misunderstanding, and asking (and figuring out how to trust) the experience of other people who have dealt with this company in the past I would have literally no time to do anything else.
Stop blaming the consumer for not working their way out of an impossible situation.
I think this criticism is called for. The customer tried asking them nicely and it sounds like they did not try very hard to fix it -- which is an experience I can empathize with 100 times over. If you've ever dealt with companies, you know that they often have policies and procedures that intentionally screw customers and they only back off if it blows up publicly. Because they can. Our accountability mechanisms suck.
I agree with most of what you say, but why do you take for granted that it's up to the customer to demonstrate that the product is defective? Furthermore, where does the idea that the customer must be able to communicate this to a uninformed clerk come from?
Going from "nobody has complained" to "the customers are happy" does not seem too much of a stretch, particularly for an expensive unit. Granted, it doesn't logically follow, but I would class this as a reasonable deduction from evidence rather than a fallacy. Note also that it's self-correcting - once one person complains, the company can't use that defense any more.
Yes, I agree with that. It is not that customer is always right. But it is not that customer is always wrong either. We have to look at requirements, give them benefit of doubt, ask and listen to answers to figure out which are wrong.
Often, there are one or two voices inside of a company that have the same complaints as customers, but they can't get any traction on the issue until users complain about it. I've been on several projects where we coached or were coached about asking our boss to ask their boss for something with a specific keyword that they could use for leverage.
In college, I left my ATM card in a machine and the person behind me pulled out the max daily limit on my account. I don't think the cops were able to ID him off of the grainy back-lit video from the machine. This was a new model of ATM that had worse ergonomics than the previous one. Turns out someone at the bank already hated these machines, and he arranged to refund me the lost money (which I'm fairly sure now he would have had to do anyway) in exchange for a signed complaint that he could add to his evidence trove.
"People are dumb. A person is smart." also applies to companies.
The thing is that if you're too rude when you make a complaint, you make bad evidence. If you're too polite, the same is also true. "We should fix this because this totally happy customer said we should" might work once in a while but it's easier to sell your boss on "customers are pissed about X which is also pissing me off." I struggle to find the right line between the two when I have to call customer support. Since I don't usually like to call CS at all, when I do it's usually because I'm pretty spun up.
Cannot upvote this enough. People complaining about such things think that "customer is always right" where reality is "customer is always right if he pays enough for us to care". Have some reality check.
Every company does what is in their best interest not particular customer.
I think a lot of times customers are expecting the service provider to provide adequate customer service as part of the service they are purchasing and have no reason to suspect it will be sub-par until they are already paying for it.
They should be happy that the customers are complaining, it gives them a chance to consider their concerns. I just usually walk away without warning if I'm unhappy with a product, customers like me force businesses to do a lot of detective work to find out the reasons for bad retention.
If someone replies to me they deserve a response, that is why I am here for discussion.
I totally understand that mentality. I'm just saying I've found it helpful, sometimes, to let other people have the last word. Sometimes my original statement stands for itself and doesn't need to be reiterated.
I don't necessarily think you were being unreasonable. I don't have enough information to really judge that, especially if it comes down to tone. I'm just saying in general that if you're going to do things like this, to keep in mind that the other person is also testing and judging you. Maybe he didn't care about good customer service and your heuristic for determining a good vendor worked, or maybe you tripped his heuristic for determining a toxic customer and he decided to write you off. To some extent that'll have to happen, but it's worth maybe a moment's consideration. That's all.
A great first step would be to take responsibility for what the customer has proven to happen. "It is definitively not the case that doing" is directly at odds with what the author provides, you might want to reframe your message to "it shouldn't be like this but unfortunately it is like this right now, sorry" rather than dismissing the author with that they are not correct.
Those are the ones where I can tell you from my own first hand experience that overall you are better off giving accurate information late than wrong or incomplete information early
My expirience is the opposite. All customers I have dealt with were very happy to receive an acknowledgement early and a post-mortem analysis later.
Most customers don't care one bit about what is wrong, they care about when their service will be restored. Knowing "they are working on it" is already one step up from "Does this affect only me? Have they even noticed, yet?".
BS. It's possible to deal with the issues you mentioned and not screw your customers over. Even if it's not, it's still perfectly valid to be vocal about it.
Not in the slightest? So the CMO gets no credit for acknowledging the mistake?
I would be willing to bet that the CMO is not in any sort of position to make the necessary changes to ensure that this doesn't happen again, and so your suggestion is beyond his ability. By acknowledging the customer's frustration he lets the OP know that the company understands that this is an issue, and is now going to make an effort to correct it. In other words, "he has been heard".
Obviously, the comment alone is not enough, but it's a vital first step towards high quality customer support, and probably an instructive lesson for anybody in a service business.
That may be, and that's why it's a good idea to wait for proof. People saying "I told you so" or "Every time" are missing the point and not helping.
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