Inflexible company policies and how they affect customer service

I recently booked my summer holiday with a well-known, trusted holiday company. I’d badly needed a holiday for a while and had worked solidly for twelve months to save the funds for a therapeutic ten days in the sun. My positive feelings of achievement and pride when the last monthly payment had left my bank account were amazing. I am sure you know the kind of feeling I am talking about; if I could bottle that feeling I’d be a very rich individual.

Imagine my dismay, when I looked at my booking to find that an earlier amendment to my luggage requirement, made during a telephone conversation with one of their operatives, had somehow ended up with them knocking the Y off the end of my surname. I knew I was going to have to ring them to put it right but I was already feeling less positive about things, at the inconvenience for me of having to get back in touch.

We all make mistakes, I know. And individuals working in the service industry don’t deliberately set out to ruin your day. I rang them back and said, “I am sorry but it looks like you accidentally deleted the Y off my surname.” Back came the sharp reply, “You’ve made a mistake at the time of booking, it will cost you fifty pounds in administration charges.” I responded with, “If you look back, you can see it was correct until you made the change today.” She said, “I don’t need to look back, if you don’t pay the fifty pounds for me to add the letter Y back on, you won’t be able to fly. It’s company policy.”

My good feelings diminishing by the second, I took it further by speaking to several customer service managers who all said the same and wouldn’t look back. They were utterly inflexible over the company policy even though it was their mistake! Customer service wasn’t just low here, it was nonexistent. It was as if they were saying, “We don’t care who made the mistake, even if it was ours. We just want the additional fifty pounds and quite frankly we don’t care if you never book with us again. We’re sticking to the company policy because that’s how we get more money out of you.”

Here at Cultrix we are mindful of the old saying, “It’s easier to keep a customer than find a new one.” In our experience this is always the case. And it speaks volumes about how much we value our customers that we would rather add a credit to your account regardless of whether we had made a mistake or not, because we care about our customers’ feelings. Inflexible policies like the ones the holiday company enforce show a total disregard for how their customers feel. How can customer service thrive in this scenario? It can’t.

Find out in my next post about how being short-staffed and having overworked staff can run down customer service. And just in case you missed my last post: Sales targets and their effect on customer service.

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