Always look at your support policies from the standpoint of the user – you might be surprised how good ideas don’t come off that way.
I don’t like to call people out for bad support, but I have to comment on how Jawbone went from hero to zero in about 30 seconds today.
I had an old Jambox which quit working. Being me, the first place I turned for help was the web. At first I was disappointed in Jawbone’s support communities. It seems others had the same problem as me but no one from the company ever took the time to add anything to the communities except ‘we know about this problem, please call us’. I made the call and was almost immediately connected to a support representative. She was pleasant and professional, but I assume from the poor quality of the connection we had and her problems understanding me the call center likely was offshored. Of course I am no fan of offshoring anything, especially support. America has the most talented workforce in the world, and it is the right thing to keep our jobs local, especially when you are talking about people who are on the front lines of your company. Anyway, I am not here to rant about offshoring. For all I know their call center is in Dallas – it just didn’t seem that way.
After exchanging some information we immediately came to the resolution that my Jambox was dead and out of warranty. I would have expected the call to end there but she had an offer for me. A 15% discount on a new unit. Cool! I was going to buy a replacement anyway so this was a nice offer to keep me as a customer. What she said next is where it all went wrong. It would take 3-5 days to send me the code. Three to five days! Really?
Once I ended the call it then took me all of five minutes to hit up Amazon and find a product that fit my needs, and with my Prime membership I will have it Thursday – a day before I should get my 15% discount code to buy a new Jambox.
All Jawbone needs to do here is give the customer service reps the power to give out a simple code and they would have retained a customer. This is a classic example of either someone not trusting support representatives to do the right thing, or perhaps an outsourcing situation where corporate has to get the information to give the code back to the organization who is in touch with the customers. Whatever the case, it is a good policy that has been very, very poorly implemented. In a world where I can buy almost anything and have it on my doorstep in 24-48 hours, you cannot expect a customer to wait 3-5 days.
