Its never a good time for bad customer service. But its especially difficult to face bad customer service when you are already dealing with a huge personal loss like the death of a loved one. What you may expect at a time like this is empathy, helpfulness and sensitivity; and when instead you get rote, callousness and even downright rudeness, the disparity between what you expected and what you actually got feels even wider and hurts in a more personal and deeper way, than if it would have happened at any other time.
As someone in the customer service industry, I am fascinated by how we can train and equip our agents and teams to handle these kind of scenarios better. Its also a bit personal for me since this happened to me recently.
Last month, my father in law passed away suddenly in Toronto while my wife and I were in Barcelona with our kids for a spring vacation. Hearing such news is never easy. But hearing it while you are in a country far away, where you may not have any support system or structure in place, where you not know anyone who you could turn to for help makes it all the more difficult. As soon as we got the news, we wanted to cancel the rest of the vacation and fly back home to Toronto ASAP. In this time of confusion and mental distress, we called our airline to ask them to get us a flight back right away. We might as well have walked home 😞
I wont talk about long and deep IVRs and a wait time for 40 mins to speak to an agent. I wont talk about the fact that the first agent I spoke to took my details and then I got disconnected and had to call back and start at the end of the queue all over again (thankfully *only* 25 mins this time). But I will talk about the fact that when I explained our situation to him, he said Oh yes, he could get me a flight back home, there were several seats available on the flight, but the cost would be CAD $16,000 for the 4 of us (my wife, my 2 kids and me). 16,000 dollars!!! I mentioned that I already had a return ticket and had already technically paid for my fare back home - so I could understand if there was a change fee or something but not to the tune of $16,000. To put that number in perspective, our 2 way fare from Toronto to Barcelona was a total of CAD $3200 for the 4 of us combined - so now having to pay $16,000 on top of that for a one way ride seemed really ridiculous.
I asked for the manager and of course, after another wait of around 10 mins, spoke to him and got responded to with the same thing. At least he was a little more sympathetic, but mentioned that he could not do anything since that was the price that the system was showing. But the system did not know that we were not returning home because we flippantly changed our minds. The system did not know that my wife was in shock and crying all the time I was on the phone trying to get a ticket. The system did not understand death and emergencies. I would have expected the company and the humans however to understand that. I would have expected them to have processes in place to help with dire situations like this. I would have expected them to not look at it as a huge profit opportunity. I don't want to publicly name the airline here since thats not the purpose of the article, but if you are from an airline or any other company where these kind of situations may occur - I encourage you to understand the processes and procedures your agents would follow and if they make sense. Are they allowing the situation to be handled with empathy? Do they help the agents deal with the situation with human regard and understanding? Because if they don't, not only have you missed the mark from a humane perspective, but in your rush for short term dollars have lost that customer (and the others they will tell about this experience) for life. I will never go back to that airline. The dozens of people I have spoken about this to will think twice before going with that airline. If I talk about this on the airlines Twitter / Facebook and other social feeds, that number could be considerably more.
Your company cannot afford that. It does not make business sense. More importantly, it does not become us as humans to take advantage of another's misfortune. Don't force your agents into that behaviour by not having the right systems and processes in place. Allow them to react with humanity. Your distraught and likely emotional customer will remember that forever, since they will *feel* that you as a company helped them in a difficult time. People may forgot what you said, or what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel. As I said in the beginning, its never a good time for bad customer service, but doing that when someone is dealing with a personal loss or death is the worst time of them all. Don't do it. We can be better than that.
Footnote: Picture courtesy KB4Images: http://kb4images.com/Death-Pictures/number-52538.html
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