Do your people really know the services you sell?

As I launch into setting up my own business as an independent, you start to appreciate the range of providers you need to contact to get things going – ASIC, accountant, Domain registration, insurances, data and phone services, accounting software, productivity tools, website hosting …. The list goes on.

In the past week I must have contacted via chat, email or phone over 30 organisations and one thing stands out when it comes to delivering exceptional customer service is the people and their knowledge of the services they offer.

Getting my mobile connected and porting my number from another carrier took 10 different interactions across my journey. Apart from the massive cost to this organisation to implement the service, what stood out is the very low understanding of the service they offer and how it works. I won’t get into the debate of offshore vs onshore, but was was critical and missing in this case was the lack of how there own service works. I felt like jumping down the phone, grabbing their keyboard and doing it myself – how I wished for self service that actually worked.

By contrast, setting up web hosting services for my domain, whilst requiring 5+ interactions was always met with people who knew what they were doing and could help me through my inquiry. Sure, they could have been friendlier, maybe second guessed my next issue (as I am a novice for setting up a website), but the one thing they did know exceptionally well was the service they sold and how to help me.

Competency of staff wins every time over a scripted, “pretending to be friendly” conversation that has staff who lack knowledge on the very service they are selling and supporting.