Earlier this year the world was shocked by a graphic video of David Dao, a Kentucky man, who was dragged off a United Flight, his face bloodied and body limp. But this wasn’t the first time United had problems. There was the famous 2009 music video, United Breaks Guitars, created after the bassist for the band Sons of Maxwell saw his $3500 Taylor bass guitar nonchalantly thrown to the ground by United baggage handlers.
Incidents like these and others turn viral on social media. They shock us, offend us, even outrage us. But are these highly visible events exceptions, or do they happen more often than we believe?
Unfortunately they’re just the tip of the iceberg. We researched the topic and found some shocking statistics about the pervasiveness of bad customer service in business today, and turned it into an infographic.
Here are some of the findings
86% of customers have to contact customer service multiple times for the same reason
Have you ever tried to get a problem resolved by calling a company’s customer service line, only to get no resolution? Fully 86% of customer service calls don’t’ resolve the issues the calls were about, forcing customers to call over and over again to try to get resolutions to the same problems.
85% are put on hold for too long
Do you think being put on hold for 5 minutes is a long time? That’s the time when people usually hang up the phone, because of the perception they’ve been left hanging for too long. And 85% of consumers calling into customer service lines feel like they’ve been put on hold for too long.
84% of customer service agents can’t answer the questions
Not being able to answer questions is so frustrating, principally because you call customer service to get your questions answer and your problems solved. A lot of this is either a training problem, a hiring problem, a process-flow problem or all three.
82% of customer service agencies are impolite or unfriendly
Now this goes directly counter to the purpose of customer service, which is to help customers. When you call into a help line you’re usually irritated, angry, and frustrated. If the customer service rep who answers is unfriendly or short with you, it could be the spark that makes you explode. The fact that 82% of reps are insensitive to the emotional state of the people calling in is completely unacceptable.
83% of consumers have to repeat the same information to multiple reps
This is my pet peeve. I have seen my emotional state go from mildly frustrated to infuriated in just a matter of minutes when I’ve been bounced from rep to rep, only to repeats my story three or more times. Unfortunately this is way too common as well.
5 negative customer experiences [infographic]
