A bad customer experience will yield bad results

This call center experience was posted:

"The other day I called into a company's sales line to place an order for an item that I had seen advertised in a national magazine. The ad was very clear in explaining the two ways to place an order. One way was to use their website and the other was to place a call on their toll free number. I chose to place the order on the toll free number because I had questions about the item and I could not find answers that satisfied me on the website.

Although the questions I had were important to me they had no bearing on my decision to place my order, which I intended to do. Now I know that this company had to have spent a lot of money on that advertisement with the purpose of getting people to give them business. Now, normally when first connected there is a notification of recording for customer assurance, which I heard none of, but they did tell me there was a survey at the end of my call which they would like me to partake. When I reached a representative, much to my disappointment and should be to the company's mortification was that that call resulted in my not only deciding to not place my order but to go to their competition and buy a similar item for more money.

The reason for this change was due to the total lack of knowledge that the representative had about the item. Then to make things worse was the rudeness I encountered from them when I politely made clear my confusion to information they were telling me which contradicted what they had told me previously when we first started our conversation.

Because I am in sales myself I did recognize that the person was trying to recoup at the end of the call, but it was too late as I had already been turned off to them and just wanted to get off the phone. Again, they did have the survey attached to the end of the call as explained when I first connected to them, but by now I was too frustrated and would not give them the satisfaction to participate.

The bottom line here is a company that spent a lot of money to get me to call them, and because it was my first encounter to do business with them, they failed miserably by losing me completely as a customer and to make matters worse they don't even know it, let alone why. Plus to compound things further, I've told a lot of friends about my experience, and this is not a good thing for them. The number one rule in business is that you need to listen to your customers. They should have been listening."

The post was submitted by a contributor to Stayinginbusiness.com