I have a confession to make… I am extremely harsh when it comes to customer support. I’ve spent quite a while being a tech support engineer, I know how much it matters in building a great relationship with customers. So when I make my decisions about certain products or services, the quality of tech support backing them up is extremely important.  Why? It is simple. Anything can crash. No one should look for guarantees they will have no problems, they should make sure they will have help solving them when they appear. And based on my fare share of customer support talks, chats, email exchanges, I thought I’d make a top of the best ways to drive customers away.

1. Don’t pick up when they call

Definitely, this is the fastest and never dethroned method to make sure your customers will switch you for any of your competitors quicker then lightning.

2. Ignore the problems!

Have your customers report the same problem a few times and then make sure you constantly ignore it when you reply. This is bound to drive them nuts! So you’ll have a lot less of them to worry about!

3. Be nice, but completely unhelpful!

Make sure you explain in the nicest manner out there that nothing of what the customer needs will ever be possible. Remember, smile and keep being inflexible and unwilling to adapt or change! That should scare them off!

4. Don’t get your message straight before sending it!

Confuse them and then rule them all! The moment they get  a bit upset, send them a quick email promising something, to then have it contradicted by another representative of your company.

5. Be completely inconsiderate when it comes to their needs or issues

When you make major changes that affect the way their business works, don’t ever ask them if they’re OK with it! Just go ahead and if it’s in the middle of the week, even better!

What would you add to the top? I’m curious to find out what your experiences have been.

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I know a lot about the pressure in a customer support department! I know about the large number of emails, chats and phones an engineer needs to handle! I know how vague customer requests can be. But under all that stress and all that pressure and in that awful race against time, one rule still needs to be complied with: before starting to write the reply to an email inquiry, stop and read the initial message and make sure you understand it.

If it’s vague, ask for details. If you don’t get it, ask a colleague for help (support teams are usually quite tight and help each other a lot). Whatever you do, do not reply to the email when you don’t fully understand it. Don’t rush into sending a reply, just to tick another email off the target when you think you know what the customer is asking.

This all becomes even more important when it takes 2 weeks to send that reply. After two weeks of waiting, your customer expects a decent answer to their question, if not a real solution. If your answer only shows them you’ve schemed through their 5 line email and picked up some keywords, like a robot, then wrote to them and asked them to call a number for more help, they’ll be pissed.

And remember, if you create a web customer care application encouraging them to send emails to your support team, make sure you:

• take way under 2 weeks to reply
• if your emails are sent to engineers based on the topic, make sure the person getting them is actually an expert
• again, say it with me: READ THE EMAIL and make sure you UNDERSTAND it
• direct them to an alternative means of communication only when you absolutely cannot help them, not to delegate responsibility to someone else.

Customer support is about more than response times, number of emails/phones/chats closed, and other such metrics. It’s about how many customers you’ve actually helped, how many of them feel they no longer have a problem with your product or service. If you don’t have that in mind as a business, no matter how big you are, you will lose them to the competition, as slightly better services and products is not enough to compensate poor customer service for too long.

And if you’re wondering what triggered this, it’s an email reply from one of the two major mobile phone operators in Romania, which came after two weeks and helped with nothing, as they didn’t get anything from what I was writing…Very dissapointing.