Residents complain of 'poor' customer service

It’s common knowledge that happy customers equals to a healthy business. Research has proven that it costs significantly less to keep an old customer than acquiring a new one.

This isn’t just about re-marketing to existing customers, but about delivering over-the-top service throughout the customer relationship so that a loyal customer remains with the brand.

However, an 'Emirates24|7' poll reveals their customer service experience has been bad.  Majority (49 per cent) of the online respondents believe their experience with customer service executives on different occasions can be tagged nothing but bad.

Of those making up the majority, 23 per cent believe their past customer service experience can  be graded as poor and  for 26 per cent it’s even worse, making it ‘very poor’.

The biggest number of respondents (33  per cent) said the kind of service they’ve received can only be rated as average.

On the other hand, 14 per cent said their experience with customer service representatives was good and 5 per cent rated it as excellent.

“My husband went to get his clearance letter for the car loan taken from the bank. The receptionist said that he needed to first put in a request and then pay Dh50 to obtain the letter. The lady was rude on the phone so he directly went to the car loan department. He got the NoC from them in 2 to 3 working days without any changes,” wrote one aggrieved customer.

Highlighting the issue that we face on a daily basis, one responded wrote about her bitter experience with a bank in the city.

“I had to visit the bank’s branch twice just to activate my internet banking account – all this because the customer service agent wrote down a wrong e-mail id.

“You can understand my frustration. I desperately needed my internet banking account. I had to run all over the place to pay my bills in person. The 45 C outside does not help. I had to visit two branches because of their mistake and there was never any column on the form asking for a specific internet banking account email address. This is nonsense, it does not exist,’ she added.

Another reader complained of the bad customer service at a telecom operator. “All I wanted to know what would the charges be if I were to downgrade my BB package from mid-month. Would I get charged for the whole month or the time used? However, nobody was able to give me a clear answer,” wrote an irritated customer.

How I may not help you?

Most common instances of bad customer service in the city complied after taking readers’ comments into consideration.

1.Restaurant service at peak dinner time can often lead to bad customer service. It’s all about overworked waiters, food delay, price rise, food quality lowered and bad service.

2.Another common instance is when people have to keep calling toll-free customer service numbers and get foxed by a huge menu with no option to talk to ‘someone’ at the other end – true, especially of bank telephone links as some do not have a ‘talk to a banker’ option.

3.The take it or leave it attitude at counters – eg. call centres said specified rate for clearance letter is XX but ‘customer service rep’ at bank quoted [and got] 50 per cent higher amount.

4.So many reception executives take their sweet time to answer, if at all?

5. Official rudeness – just because official does not mean you can be  uncivil.

(Image courtesy Shutterstock)

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