Customer care is the whole of what happens to a person after they have paid you, the answering and the remembering and the holding of some small thing until it is finished, and it goes by the name of care in a good many trades on account of the word service having been worn thin by the people who sell training in it. Nobody buys it. There is no line on an invoice anywhere that says care. There is no meeting either where a company sits down and settles what the whole of it ought to look like. It gets made out of ordinary Tuesdays instead, and most places only ever find out what theirs is like by going back through old mail on a morning they had gone in there for something else entirely.
Deirdre found hers on a Wednesday in November, and she was not looking for it, she was doing a job she had been putting off for a fortnight. The family sell and fit stairlifts and mobility scooters out of a unit outside Dundalk, four of them in the office and three fitters in vans. The manufacturer had gone and issued a safety notice on a run of chargers, so somebody had to go back through four years of mail and pull the address of every customer who might be holding one. That was her. Somewhere in the September of the year before she came on a thread from a woman by the name of Ann Marie, whose father had a lift on the stairs of a house in Blackrock. It ran to three mails over five weeks, and three different people out of Deirdre’s own office had answered them. Every reply was polite. Every one of them went out inside the day, which is better than most firms manage. And the third one asked Ann Marie which model her father had on the stairs, which was the very thing she had put in the first line of her first mail. She had said it again in the middle one.
She never wrote a fourth time. She went and bought the scooter that spring off a crowd in Drogheda.
The bit that sat with Deirdre for the rest of that week was that not one of the three had done a careless thing. Peadar was out on a fit in Cavan when the first mail came in and he answered it off his phone in the van, properly and at length. The girl on the desk was three weeks in the job when the second one arrived and she did what anybody would do, she answered the question that was in front of her. The third was Deirdre’s own brother at about nine at night, clearing what he could see so the morning would be lighter. He had never laid eyes on the other two. They were sitting in two other people’s sent items, and no screen he owned was ever going to show them to him. Three good turns, all told. One woman telling the same story three times over, and going a little colder each time she had to tell it.
What the word care is doing that service and support are not
They had a row about the wording of a job ad that October, which sounds like a small thing and turned out to be the useful part of the whole autumn. Peadar wanted customer service in the title, since that is what everybody puts and it is what people go searching for. Her brother held out for support, on account of a fair half of the work being a lift stopped on the third step at ten at night with a man sitting on it. Deirdre wanted care and could not say why for a good long while, past a feeling that the other two words describe a thing that closes.
Customer service covers the handling of the transaction, the quote and the survey and the fit and the invoice after it, and all of that has a date on it and finishes. Customer support is narrower again and it is the fixing, where something has gone wrong and somebody puts it right. You can count those, and most firms do count them. Care will not sit still for either description, since it does not finish. The daughter ringing in March about a charger is the same daughter who rang in September about a seat belt, and if nobody in the building knows that, her March call starts from nothing. And she can hear it starting from nothing, which is the half of it that does the quiet damage, since she will be the one deciding where the next thing gets bought.
In this particular trade the word is not being borrowed either, mind you. A fair share of the customers are being cared for in the plainest sense of it by a son or a daughter or a neighbour, and the person writing in to the office is somebody else again. Hardly ever the one on the stairs. Deirdre had two names on nearly every job for years. She had never once gone and thought of that as a thing the business ought to know deliberately, rather than a thing a few of them happened to remember.
How three good answers went and added up to no care at all
Nothing broke. That is the part worth sitting with, and it is why this goes unnoticed for years in a firm where everybody is decent at their job. The mail came into the one address, the way it does in most small places, and from there it dropped into whoever had it set up to arrive. Each of them answered out of their own mail like any normal person answering anything at all, and the reply went into their own sent items the very same way, with the history of it in there along with it.
So the second person to answer Ann Marie was working off one mail out of three, and the third was working off one out of three as well, a different one. Neither of them was ever going to notice, mind you, since a thing you cannot see does not announce its self as missing. There was no screen anywhere in that unit that showed the three of them together. The only place those five weeks existed as one conversation was in Ann Marie’s own head, and she was the only one in the whole of it who could not do anything about it.
Five weeks is the rest of it. Had the three mails come in on the one afternoon, somebody would have joined them up out of memory and the thing would never have happened. Spread over five weeks, with a bank holiday in the middle and a week where two of them were at a trade show in the RDS, there is no memory to work off. And memory was the entire system, truth be told. Nobody had gone and written anything down, on account of the writing down being nobody’s job, and the sheet they did keep had the fits and the invoices on it and not one word about a conversation.
Why the warm answer landed worse than the blunt one
Deirdre read the three replies back one after the other, which she would recommend to anybody with an hour and a strong stomach, and the third of them was easily the warmest. It opened by thanking Ann Marie for her patience and said the writer would be delighted to get this sorted for her. That was the one that ended it.
She sat with that a while, since it goes against the whole of what she had ever been told about tone. Warmth from somebody who has plainly not read what you wrote lands as being handled rather than being helped. People hear the difference the very second it arrives, mind you, they have heard it from banks and phone companies for years and they know the sound of it. A blunt answer from somebody who has read the thread reads as respect, funnily enough. And the word patience was doing real damage in that sentence. She had not been patient at all, she had been asked to start again twice.
There is proper research sitting behind this and it is worth the line. The Effortless Experience work, out of what was CEB and is Gartner now, found that going above and beyond does a good deal less for loyalty than companies assume. What predicts whether people stay is the effort of it, how much they have to spend to get their thing done. Deirdre’s own best memory of being looked after was a fella in a parts place in Navan who told her flat out that the part was discontinued and there was nothing doing on it. Then he rang her back on the Friday he said he would ring, with the name of somebody who might have one. He was not warm in the slightest. He remembered her, and that is a different thing, and it is what most people mean by care when you get them talking about it.
None of which is an argument for being short with anybody. Tone is worth having and a decent reply reads better than a curt one, all the same. It is only that tone is what a company can teach in a morning, so it is what gets taught. The remembering wants a change in how the work is arranged, no two ways about it, and so it tends not to get done at all.
What a customer care advocate does all day, when the title means anything
They put customer care advocate on the ad in the end. Deirdre will admit to about half of that being vanity, though the other half was an honest description of what they wanted somebody to do. In a large company the title sits on the frontline person who works the queue, and there might be forty of them under a team lead, and the word advocate is meant to say that the job is to take the customer’s side of it inside the building. In a seven person firm it is a hat somebody puts on for a few hours in the week. Peadar wears it here, in between fits.
What he does with it is dull and it is mostly reading. Before he answers anything at all he goes and reads what was said to that customer before, which looks obvious written down like that and was not happening at all a year ago. Anything older than a week belongs to him by name rather than to a room, so a thread that has been sitting since Tuesday has a person on it who will be asked about it. And he chases the promises, which is the change that saved them the most bother in the end. Near enough every complaint they have ever had came out of a thing somebody said they would do and then did not do. Hardly one of them came out of work done badly.
The other half of the job is the writing down, and he does that bit his own self rather than ask the fitters to do it. A fitter rings in now and then from a house with something the office ought to know, a rail that will want an extension when the daughter moves the bed downstairs, and that goes on the customer’s thread in a line of plain English while he is still on the phone. It sits there for eighteen months doing nothing. Then she writes in about the bed, and the answer comes back knowing about the rail, and to her that is a company that went and paid attention the whole time, when the whole of it was a fella typing one line in April between two other jobs.
Customer care software, and what the word platform is doing in that sentence
By the time Deirdre went looking at tools she had the requirement written on the back of a docket, and there was not a lot on it. She wanted to open a customer and see whether anybody in the office was holding their thread this minute, and which of them it was. The promises were the other half of it, what had been said to the woman and on what date, since two of those three replies had promised her something and neither man knew the other had. And under the whole of that sat the plain thing she could not get past, which was that a person writing in for the third time ought to meet somebody who has read the first two.
The category words are doing less work than the websites let on. Customer care software, a customer care system, a customer care platform, and the customer care app somebody will mention on a call, they mostly land on the very same thing, which is one shared queue with the history hanging off the customer instead of off whoever happened to answer. That is the whole of it. A salesman used the word platform at her twice on the one call, and what it came down to was live chat and a social inbox she had no earthly use for, at a price to suit. App mostly tells you there is a phone version of the thing. The older ones call themselves a system out of habit more than anything else. None of that told her whether any of them would suit four people in an office outside Dundalk.
What told her more was the asking. She put the very same questions to every tool she looked at and got a straight answer to the lot of them from one, which told her a fair bit its self. Searching was where she pushed hardest, on account of a great many of their customers having no email in their lives at all and the address on a thread belonging to a daughter, in another county more often than not, so a surname and a phone number have to be enough to turn up the father. Price she went at sideways, asking not what it cost but whether it climbed every time she added a person, because the fitters and the girl doing the invoices need to be in there now and again and not one of them is support staff. The last one she nearly forgot. What becomes of ten years of history the day somebody leaves the company, and nobody goes and asks that until the week after it has cost them something.
She did look at a satisfaction score as part of the same fortnight and put it aside for the year, which is worth admitting here. Four people in an office are not short of feedback about how they are getting on, they hear it in the yard and on the phone all week long. The thing they had none of was the thread, and no score was ever going to hand them that.
Where we come into it, and where we plainly do not
Here is our one mention of ourselves, with the honest part attached to it, since a page about care that sells hard would be a poor advertisement for the argument in it. Over here at Maxdesk what we make is a shared inbox with a ticketing system sitting behind it, so the mail lands in one queue that everybody can see, with every earlier conversation attached to the customer instead of to a person. It is there before anybody types a word. Nothing of ours is charged per agent, and the free plan is $0 with unlimited agents on it. That matters more in a firm like Deirdre’s than it looks on paper, on account of the people who hold the facts being the fitters and the accounts desk rather than anybody with support in their job title. A knowledge base will hold the standing answers, the charger notice being a fine example of one, so the third person to be asked gives the same answer as the first.
The limits are not small ones on this particular subject and you should hear them from us. We do email, and email only. There is no phone line in the product and no live chat. A mobility firm does a great deal of its care over the telephone with people who will never send a mail in their lives, so a fair half of Deirdre’s care goes on somewhere outside of the product altogether. We cannot see a bit of it. What we can do is hold the note somebody writes after the call, in the thread with everything else, and that only works at all if they write it, and if your care is mostly voice then most of the good here is the record rather than the handling.
And there is history, which is the one that stings on a page about remembering people, so we will put it plainly. The free workspace keeps three months of rolling ticket and report and audit history, counted off the last activity on a ticket rather than the day the thing was opened. It carries supporting ads in the agents’ side of the workspace as well, along with our branding on the mail going out, though the customer sees a normal mail from your own address. A Pro workspace runs to $20 a month and carries twelve months of the stuff. Elite at $99 holds twenty four. A stairlift customer comes back in year four. So even at the top of that the deep past wants to live in your customer records as well, and we would far rather say so here than have somebody find it out in month eight.
Whatever you land on, ours or anybody else’s, the first step costs nothing and it takes a morning. Go back through last month’s mail and find every customer who had to say the same thing twice, and leave the complaints out of it, the ordinary threads are the ones that tell you. Go and count them. Then read the last reply each of those people got, out loud if you can stand it your own self, and ask whether it sounds like it was written by somebody who knew who they were. Whatever that count comes to is a fair description of your care, and a good deal more honest than the number a survey would hand you for the very same week.
Deirdre posted the charger notices in the second week of December. Ann Marie’s went out with the rest of them. She rang her the same afternoon as well rather than leave it at a letter, since the lift on the stairs in Blackrock is still theirs to service whatever about the scooter coming from Drogheda. She had the thread open in front of her while the phone was ringing, all five weeks of it. The call took a minute and a half. The woman was grand about the whole thing, and the only difference between that call and the three mails the year before is that this time somebody knew who she was before they started talking.