We experienced a situation the other day in which one of our vendor’s products failed us. This was not a small or low priority issue, it was high priority and very costly for our company. We spent the entire day calling the vendor trying to get an answer on what was wrong and when it would be resolved. The longer the issue was not resolved, the larger and more costly the problem became. The vendor is a Fortune 500 company that operates nationwide.
Every individual we spoke with at this company was extremely polite and apologetic, however, no one could give us any real information. After 7 long hours of this, we finally got a return call from a Vice President of the company, who obviously was unaware of our dilemma, but said she would look into it. The issue was resolved after 8 hours.
In reviewing the incident, the main problem with this vendor’s customer service was that none of the individuals we spoke with, (which included service technicians, supervisors, managers, and one Vice President) seemed to be empowered to even get us an answer of any kind. It took seven hours before they would even tell us what had caused the problem. This information should have been available to us hours earlier. Even then, we were not even given an estimate on how much longer it would take to resolve it.
When a customer is dealing with a failed product, they should at least be given as much information as the vendor has available. The vendor should also continually contact the customer with updates, even if it is to say nothing more than, “we are still working to resolve this and have not forgotten about you”. Had they stayed in touch with us at least once every hour or two, we would have felt more like they really cared and were doing everything they could to resolve it.
Does your company have a plan in place to deal with a customer emergency? If not, plan it now so you will be able to give true customer service when it’s needed most.
The author, Marge Bonura, is the Director of Sales & Marketing for New England Machinery, Inc. (NEM). NEM is a leading packaging machinery manufacturer of bottle unscramblers, cappers, orienters, retorquers, lidders, pluggers, pump sorter/placers, scoop feeders, hopper elevators and much more. The company has been in business since 1974 selling to the food, beverage, pharmaceutical, personal care, chemical, household products, automotive and other industries. For more information on NEM, visit their website at www.neminc.com.
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