Contact Us, CallBack, Live Chat
February 14, 2008 at 12:11 pm
Arriving back on Irish shores in 2001 from the customer-service rich land of Australia, there were a number of things that I’d taken for granted that had to be let go:
- Service with a smile
- Eye contact when purchasing something
- Expecting serving staff in convenience stores to actually bother to say the amount owed and then ‘thank you’
- Thai food without water chestnuts
On the plus side, there were many things that I was pleased to welcome into my life:
- Ability of most people to remember my name and not automatically abbreviate it
- Being able to pronounce the letter R correctly for the first times in ages. As in “or” and not ‘ar’
- Being able to speak in my natural accent and not having to endure the monotony of questions which goes a little something like this:
- You’re from Ireland? Yes.
- My grandmother came from Ireland. [Feigns interest] Oh really?
- I’ve never been to Ireland but I’ve always wanted to go…
- Not being surrounded by insecure people whose cultural focal point is the plastic side of Los Angeles
Perhaps the single biggest thing I had to let go of in the online environment was the response time expected from contact us. My experience was to ensure that all enquiries to a website be replied to within 24 hours. When I started working in Ireland, I’d often be faced with looks of disbelief when I made this suggestion. So I let it go, and concentrated instead on eradicating ‘click here’ from Irish websites.
I’ve noticed recently that not only has this changed and in fact, many commercial sites are replying within 24 hours, but many have also added ‘live chat‘. Real time chat with their people. You click the live chat box, type in your question or query and a person on the other end should reply. Simple. Amazing and it works!
Or for businesses that don’t have too many staff sitting on computers at the other end, call back is a great option. You want a question answered, you don’t want to wait 24 hours for a reply to contact us, so you hit ‘call me back button’, type in your name and number, and magically a member of staff will call you back in a couple of minutes. We’ve added this feature to some recent sites, have a look, but please don’t click unless you’re interested in Fleet Management or Fashion: Merrion Fleet and MacLeod Agencies.
Sadly though there are some cases of where call back / live chat is horribly wrong – like on the hosting company, HostIreland.com website for example. You’d think that a company of their nature (web-based, ‘tech savvy’) would get it right but no. This morning, after spending 15 minutes on hold on their phone line, I clicked the link to LIVE CHAT, filled in my details, and was hoping for a response.. but no. Those idiots have actually put a contact us form on their site posing as live chat. I don’t know why they have done that.
It’s -100% customer service points when you pretend to offer something.
Another case of the basics being done badly is the Bord Gais website. Designed and developed by Strata3, so it can’t have been cheap. It looks lovely. But I’m still waiting on a reply from Bord Gais from 3 weeks ago. I used the contact us button to ask a question – why do I not receive any notice in relation to direct debits? Bills arrive with huge amounts and my bank account is hit the same day, or in some cases, a day earlier. Doesn’t give a girl a chance to prepare…
What’s your view? Are Irish sites finally coming into the customer service era? Does increased competition mean more service? Does a slowing economy make us more hungry for converting enquiries into sales? And why oh why do our public service sites lead the way in terms of how not to do it?
Comments (3 responses)
Let’s start a blog about the difference between Irish and Australian service (says one recently returned..) the main issue I have had is how long my internet took to get connected and how many follow-up calls I had to make before this happened, my form was lost etc……I’m boring myself even thinking about this now versus internet connection happened overnight in Oz for me…..However, the one thing I’d forgotten about Ireland and LOVE was the laid-back approach to rules. Two examples of this, one the passport customs guy in Dublin Airport let me through without seeing my passport as I couldn’t find it with the words ‘ah sure you have an honest face’ (true story), try telling that to Border Security in Sydney!! Secondly, I called the public health service on my return home to be left holding, holding, holding until eventually the guy answered and I asked him how come it took so long to answer the phone…….and he said ‘there’s twelve lines here luv……..’ and proceeded to rant and rave about how much he had to do, I replied acidly ‘should I tell you what I need so you can get back to your twelve lines?’ he said ‘Did you sharpen that knife this morning luv?’ – Irish wit, I missed it so much!!
Sorry to hear about your broadband woe Sue. If you want to actually do something about it, you can complain to poster boy Eamo the new Minister. More info here: http://brightspark-consulting.com/blog/?p=444
[...] Amnesty International: part of their fabulous Unsubscribe-Me campaign, they have created an international action page for people like you and me to get involved in the campaign to get Maher Rafat al-Quwari repatriated to a safe country; to anywhere but Guantanamo Bay. The one downside of this action page is that it links you to the US Army website where you’re supposed to be able to work out for yourself which part of the army you should direct your request to. It scores highly in that they give you the text to use. But I didn’t want to get my head around the US Army website, so I hit the contact us button on the unsubscribe me site on Saturday asking for help. Let’s see how long it takes them to respond. I really hope that Amnesty isn’t an all gloss, uber designed campaign with no follow up. View recent post on lack of contact us. [...]
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