Top Customer Service Fails of 2016
BARE International shares an article from Customer Think on the Top Customer Service Fails of 2016. Make your you’re avoiding these blunders in 2017!
‘If you’ve ever tweeted about waiting on hold with a call center your frustrations have likely been cataloged on the website onholdwith.com. The site scans Twitter for complaints about being on hold with customer service and categorizes them in real-time by company and industry name. Fonolo launched this as a public service so that people could vent about waiting on hold, while organizations can see just how much goodwill they are losing from customers.
For many, simply knowing that they are not alone provides comfort during an otherwise anxiety ridden experience. The larger purpose of the site is to bring awareness to the problem of long hold times and help companies benefit from potential solutions.
Over the year, every complaint that was directed at a company on Twitter, and contained the phrase ‘on hold with’, was tracked and recorded. The results are revealed in “The Top 25 Worst Hold Time Offenders of 2016” list, which counts down the companies who experienced the highest number of customer complaints about waiting on hold.
The biggest surprises? Amazon and Apple’s appearances on the list are more unexpected than others. It seems despite Amazon’s best efforts, they need to ramp up their operations to compensate for supply and demand. And while Apple is no stranger to consumer popularity, it moved up from fifth place to first place on this year’s list; a fair warning for those hoping to make any last minute MacBook purchases for the holidays.
The most unsurprising? The IRS and the DMV. We’ve grown to expect that anything government related will be slow and aggravating. But if you want a laugh, the IRS tweets are among the most humorous to say the least, including one of our favorites: “Hey @IRSnews I’ve been on hold for 30 minutes, whatcha doin over there? Hopefully finishing up @realDonaldTrump ‘s tax audit! #humor”
Then there’s those pesky telecom providers who are headed for a chilly response from customers waiting on hold (32% of the top offenders come from a telecommunications company). In fact, there’s a bit of a pattern from an industry perspective.
The top 5 worst industries are as follows:
- Telecommunications (32%)
- Airline/Travel (20%)
- Retail (16%)
- Financial (12%)
- Government (1%)
But in all fairness, every call center is vulnerable to unexpected weather conditions, agent absenteeism and increased call volume resulting in long hold time. The best approach for avoiding a call center catastrophe? Equip your contact center with the necessary solutions to defend against these problems.’
Did you know that as part of BARE International’s Customer Satisfaction Toolkit, we offer your company Social Media Scanning technologies? While direct customer feedback is a key part of our research methodology, social media scans provide a valuable piece of BARE’s 360-degree approach to measuring customer perception and satisfaction.
Data extraction from social media is an extremely efficient tool for observing what consumers think about a company and its products or services, as it does not require the explicit solicitation of customer impressions.
Click here to find out more on BARE’s Customer Satisfaction Toolkit. Don’t miss out on our limited-time complimentary evaluation of your business, simply fill out the slide in form on the homepage and we’ll get back to you. Keep your company off the naughty list this 2017 with BARE International.
