The Upside: Killer Sales Tips from the folks at Glance Networks

Customers crave old-fashioned, friendly, and informed service over speed. And there is plenty of evidence that good customer service is positively correlated with a company's financial performance.

In a recent CRM Today survey of 2,000 consumers in the U.S and the U.K., nearly half (49%) said poor service led them to change service providers in at least one industry over the past year.

Here is my own recent Case Study of bad customer service....

I recently moved and needed to transfer my Internet service. Should be simple, right?  Then why did I dread making the phone call?  Although the Account Executive was very friendly, he was unable to make the simple service switch without the aide of a supervisor and 45 minute hold time for me. At the end of the call, he promised me all I needed to do was plug in my modem and it would all magically work. Right. (Sound familiar?)

Skeptical, I went home and plugged in the modem only to find that the magic had not happened. I sighed and uttered a naughty word as I reached to contact my ISP via phone....again. After being disconnected from the call 3 times, and with a total wait time of 23 minutes, I finally reached a "technical expert". He informed me he needed to flip a switch to "talk" to my modem and then asked me to reboot my Mac. I told him I did not want to reboot my computer as I knew it was unnecessary (being in a technical field myself). He tried to convince me otherwise