Any customer support representative can testify to the ongoing feud between customer support and the sales team. What I’m trying to say is we don’t like them either. However, it is, for the most part, not their fault that they cause problems in the business/customer relationship.

First, start off by understanding that the vast majority of salespeople are not trying to mislead you intentionally. Salespeople are not typically as well versed in a product as customer support is. Their talent is selling – something not a lot of support people are good at. They are taught by their superiors to do whatever it takes to make the customer happy. The result of the lack of knowledge and the want to please the customer is often what leads to trouble.

What happens is you, the customer, will ask a question that the salesperson does not know the answer to. Rather than appear unknowledgeable, which is a knife in the back of any potential sale, the salesperson will agree to any function of the product that sounds reasonable. They’re going to bend over backwards to make sure that a customer’s wish list is fulfilled, so they automatically assume that support will do the same. When customer support sets more realistic expectations your automatic reaction is betrayal and irritation.

So what can YOU do?

Immeadiately Call Customer Support

As soon as you’re done with the sales person, ask to be transferred to customer support or call them yourself. Find out the real deal, and clarify all the points your salesperson told you. If you’re not getting what you’re comfortable with, cancel then. No hard feelings.

It is highly unlikely that your salesperson will be involved or even interested in your account after the initial sale, so lean on customer support for any promises the salesperson might have made.

Consider the following scenario, which happens all the time at my current place of employment. I work at a company that provides website hosting and a site building program, among other things. Sales people often provide an exorbitant amount of help to the clients initially. If we were to continue to provide support at that same rate, our monthly fee would be much, much higher.

In that scenario, at no point did the sales representative lie. All the services promised can be provided, they just provided it at an expedient rate to enhance customer satisfaction. Remember again that this department has a very different mentality than other departments – so they don’t immediately see why there is, and should be, a difference in service.

Find Out About the Company

The most important factor here is how long they’ve been in business. If the company has been around for a fair number of years, you can bet that they’re doing something right with their product. Mind you, this doesn’t automatically mean that the product is right for you, but at least you should feel assured that the company as a whole is not in the game to deceive their customers.

Read All Contracts, Written Material and E-mails

Remember these things are provided to you for a reason. At least skim them. See if you see any discrepancies from what you understood or if this information raises any additional questions. If either is the case, don’t call your salesperson back, call customer support.

When to Complain

Of course, there are those representatives who are lying outright or at least lying out of ignorance. The sales department, by far, has the biggest turnover of any department no matter what company you’re looking at.  This is partially because it is a breeding ground for dishonesty, which is weeded out as quickly as possible, and partially because the environment is not something most people can enjoy for very long.

When you do hear an outright lie from a salesperson, bring it to the attention of that person’s superior. There’s no need for anger here, as it is usually an honest mistake. Ignorance can and will be corrected over time as the representative grows with the company. If the representative is dishonest, they will soon be unemployed.

Most realms of customer support direct you to a support staff. You get one of any number of representatives willing and eager to assist you at any time (during business hours). Another class of customer support representative is the account manager variety. For instance, the company I work for sells websites to (mostly) Realtors. Most requests are handled through customer support. However, I am in the marketing department. For those who pay for the service, I am a personal website marketing representative. That’s search engine marketing, or search engine optimization.

As you can imagine, the extra dough gives you, as the customer, extra privileges. But to what extent, one might ask themselves. I give my clients a run down of what they can and can’t expect from me, but I can’t (unfortunately) give them a run down of what I expect of them. So here are a few pointers.

Time

The services I provide cost my clients an additional $199.95 a month. For most people, that’s a considerable amount., almost a car payment, so I can understand why clients think this amount entitles them to constant attention. However, let’s take the same picture from a different angle. Would anyone take a job that paid them $200 a month? Of course not. Right off the bat you can logically see that you are not entitled to 100% of anyone’s time on the clock, so don’t expect it.

Now, now, be nice!

Be considerate. Often, account types like these include several meeting times. If you make an appointment be considerate of your representative’s time. They have blocked out a bit of time in their irrefutably busy schedule to talk to you. Believe me, they have a lot of other things they could be doing. Talking to clients is very rarely productive work. I apologize, but it’s the simple truth. If you review your clients, if you have them, you’ll likely agree with me. I do a lot more for my clients when I’m not on the phone with them then when I am.

In that vain, if you have to cancel an appointment, please let us know. In this day and age, I sincerely doubt that your account representative doesn’t have an e-mail address. It takes nothing to type off a quick “Can’t make that appointment, sorry!” Remember your mother’s lessons. Do unto others, etc.

Also, when you call back don’t expect your representative to be ready whenever you are. It’s mind boggling to me how often a client misses an appointment and then calls at their convenience expecting to have their appointment right then. Treat this just like the doctor’s – if you miss an appointment, you have to make, you guessed it, another appointment.

Find out realistic expectations as to how your package works. In my business, managing my customers takes planning, so if one of my clients e-mails me unexpectedly, it might take me a couple of weeks to complete the work. Responding is a different story. In any case, I can only see it as reasonable for you to get a response to an inquiry within 24-48 hours. Completed work on the other hand is not something that can be done immediately – it’s best to know and understand that up front.

Questions

Do contact your representative whenever you have a concern related to the package you’ve purchased. Remember that they can’t know there’s a problem unless you tell them there is.

Do not ask “How many clients do you have?” It’s confidential, first of all. Secondly, there is no way the question is useful to you in any way. Most people ask this as a round-a-bout way to figure out if their representative can devote enough time to their account. Judge your representative on the reasonable results of their work, not an idealized list of what you think they should be doing. Speaking of which…

Do not ask “How much time do you spend working on my account?” This is another question without a useful answer. A lot of account management jobs are like my job and the answer is, it varies. Sometimes I take care of my clients in 30 minutes, sometimes in half a day. It depends on what I’m doing. I also know the overall value or weight of what I’m doing. Sometimes a quick maintenance can go a long way. Either way, the time will never sound like enough, so don’t ask. Again, judge based on the results.

Don’t Forget To Use All Your Resources

Do not forget the customer support team just because you have a personal representative. Different departments exist for a reason. Utilize all departments necessary of any company you employ. Asking a representative like me general support questions takes time away from what you’re paying me extra to work on (for instance), so why would you waste your money that way? Additionally, you’re saving yourself the frustration of talking to someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about. I can’t answer all the technical questions about my companies’ software. My stumbling over those types of questions potentially leaves my clients wary of my competency. When it comes to marketing, I am perfectly competent – and that’s what you’ve paid me to do. You’ll find that putting uncertainty into the equation often makes you needlessly nervous.

Personally, I blame Burger King for starting the “Have it Your Way” trend. It gave people the idea that not only should their hamburgers be customized, but all their services should receive the same treatment. It’s not that I think that they should refuse to take the onions off my burger, but the concept of customizing service has gone too far.

It’s a sad, but typically accepted, fact of life that you’re not going to please 100% of the people you come in contact with. Businesses are no exception. Whenever you get in bed with a company, there’s no guarantee that they’re going to provide exactly what you need. But that’s the beauty of our consumer centered society – you have a choice. Believe me, no company is going to fault you for saying, “You know, I tried, but there’s just something missing in our relationship”.

Also keep in mind that no company is going to have 100% of what you want. Honestly, if I could combine McDonald’s fries, with Burger King’s Whopper and a Mr. Pibb from Chipotle (don’t ask me why it’s better there, it just is), I would have the perfect fast food meal. What’s the likelihood that I’m ever going to be able to get that meal from one place? Barring The Fast Food Wars predicted in “Demolition Man,” it’s not going to happen, not even at Burger King. So why, with different companies, would you expect a scenario like this?

When you’re told no, you can’t have it that way, here are a few options you have:

• Analyze. What is your current company giving you that other companies, who might have the feature you’re looking for, doesn’t? Would you be happier without the services that you’re currently receiving for the service that you’ve, thus far, gone without? If you would be happier elsewhere, go elsewhere.
• Find out your options. The better customer support representatives know the power of negative wording. Instead of saying “No, we can’t.” They should have said, “What we CAN do is…” But we both know that not every representative we come in contact with is going to be good at their job, so if they’re not forthcoming with any solution, probe. Ask, “What can I get instead of what I want?”
• Fill out a suggestion form. Believe it or not companies do listen to their customers a vast majority of the time. Your suggestion may be something that can easily be added to their list of services, just no one thought about it before. Or, you could be one of many customers that are interested in the same service. Chances are, if your request is reasonable, you may eventually get it, but only if the right people see it. Make sure your request is directed at the right people. If a suggestion form is not available, write to the president of the company.

What you don’t want to do is insist that the product or service you are being provided absolutely, without a doubt SHOULD be the way you think it should. In the end, this will only save you from unnecessary frustration.

I had a friend that had signed up with a particular Internet Service Provider, ISP, who he thought should provide him with more e-mail space than they were providing. He argued with them, literally, for well over an hour about why this made sense, and how many people he was sure wanted the same service. In the end, he ended up canceling his service, extremely irate and upset about how poorly he had been treated, and signed up with another ISP who provided the space he wanted. To this day, he struggles with the other ISP’s constant technical difficulties, something he never experienced with his first ISP. He refuses to go back though, because they could not see the logic behind giving him what he wanted.

Here’s the fallacy in his thinking. First of all, when a service is set up it’s fairly rare that, with the snap of their fingers, a customer support representative can change the internal structure of the service to provide you with something no one else is getting. Even if it was the most logical change in the world, it has to get approval from the higher ups in the company, it has to be programmed, it has to go through any one of hundreds of steps to happen. If a representative tells you it’s not a change that’s going to happen over the phone right then, it’s best to accept that answer, even if you take one of the above steps to rectify the situation.

Secondly, think about the outcome of my friend’s plight. In a fit of self-righteous fury, he created more work for himself. He had to find and set up a new service. Now, he has to deal with the frustration of technical difficulties on an almost weekly basis. Was insisting on having it his way worth it?

This is aimed at the innocent identity thieves who casually identify themselves falsely, all in the name of protecting a friend or family member from the aggravation of the customer support call. We, as customer support reps, vow to do everything we can to thwart your foolhardy, if altruistic, attempts.

Identity theft prevention is serious business, both for you, the customer, and for your customer support rep. Like anyone else, I know how frustrating it is to try to take care of a problem for someone else, only to be met with wall after wall, leaving you to cry to the heavens, “I was only trying to help!”

We know, but so are we.

One and One Make Two

Perhaps the most frequent of transgressors in this area of innocent identity theft are the spouses of the customer on file. This is business. All that flowery poetry over being two halves of the same whole only works over a candle-lit dinner or a passionate embrace. You may share an address, a last name, even that nifty toaster oven from Aunt Sue, but one thing a married couple will never share is a single identity.

Of course, there are different levels of security. You can probably get away with getting information from a cell phone plan under your wife’s name, but certain things like credit reports and credit information are an entirely different story.

I once had a woman e-mail me requesting information from her husband’s credit report. Of course, I politely refused, and explained to her that sensitive information like this could only be retrieved by the person. She repeated her request with increased fervor, telling me numerous times that with her marriage, she and her husband were one person in the eyes of God.

Finally I replied, I am not God. I can only give Mr. Bill Smith’s report to Mr. Bill Smith.

She called me a self-righteous bi-.

Okay. I understand that in most relationships, a husband would have no problem with a wife perusing thier personal information. An errant credit card debt is not what I was protecting in this case. Think about it this way. I had received an e-mail from a person identifying herself as Jane Smith. E-mails aren’t exactly difficult to get a hold of. There are countless free services letting you register almost whatever address you could think of. An e-mail baring the same last name as my customer tells me nothing. What if it wasn’t Bill’s wife Jane, but a true identity thief fishing for information. Sitting on the other end of a computer terminal, I have no way of knowing.

“Max … or is it Maxine?”

If you are one of those people with an ambiguously gendered name or voice, I’m truely sorry. Nothing can be more aggravating than someone calling you Mam when you’re a sir, or refusing you access to your own information because you don’t sound like Mr. John Brown.

The fact of the matter is, on a daily basis most customer support reps will get a fair few calls from male voices for a female’s account, or vice-versa. To us, you’re just a voice on the phone. No matter how infuriating it may be, there will be times when your rep will have to deny your request pending more information. Honestly, I would rather risk offending you and protecting your private information, than giving it out with the possibility I’m giving it to someone you wouldn’t want to have it. Annoyance aside,which would you prefer?

Tips For Account Set Up – Protect Yourself Before We Have To

• Don’t let someone else set up your accounts for you. Remember that to a company, the customer on file is who they’re going to protect. So many problems arise when someone who was once just trying to help becomes someone with the perfect tools to harm. A Realtor let her partner set up her website for her. It was his credit card on file, his name on the account. She paid him each month instead of us. When they parted on bad terms he locked her out of her account. Though it was her who put all the work and money into the site, we had no choice but to protect him
• If you know there are people in your life who are willing to make a phone call for you, and who you trust let your company know as well. Most companies have the ability to list authorized contacts for the account, saving you and your helpful partner time and frustration.