I’m reading Joseph Jaffe’s Flip The Funnel at the moment and it got me thinking about how corporations do customer service. The book cites the usual examples of those who are getting it right (Dell, Starbucks, Comcast). How do the rest shape up though?
I have a Logitech ClearChat Wireless Headset. It’s a great product, all-in-all, it uses RF (infinitely better than Bluetooth) and a USB receiver that plugs in to your computer. This arrangement means it’s free from the pairing headaches that you can get with Bluetooth devices (and the need to have Bluetooth turned on the whole time on your computer, a battery-suck when you’re unplugged).
The one gripe I have with it (as do everyone I know who has one) is that to charge it you have to use a mains power adapter. That means one more adapter to take with you when you travel (and a plug adapter for it if travelling internationally), one more thing to forget or leave behind when you pack.
I wondered if this had come up on Logitech’s support forums before. It had:
Customer: Is it possible to charge the Clearchat PC Wireless headset via USB, or does it have to be with the standard 110 cable it came with?Logitech: Hi,If you look the connector on the headset is not USB.Thank you for your post.
That’s it. Not ‘it doesn’t but we take your point’. Not ‘other people have mentioned that’. Just a plain slap in the face to someone who bought a $150 product and by extension everyone else with this opinion.
So I took a look at Logitech’s Get Satisfaction page to see if it was mentioned there. It wasn’t and even though this Get Satisfaction page, unlike many others, is monitored by Logitech employees, I can only choose one of 6 products to categorise my new topic – none of them being the one I want. For a company with well over a hundred active products at any one time, this is poor. Couple that with the note at the bottom of that GF submission form “We’ve estimated the likelihood of your question getting noticed: LOW” and I figured I just won’t bother. If someone else comes out with a similar product that doesn’t require a power brick, I’ll get that.
All in all a long way from the concept of Customer Service 2.0 as outlined in Jaffe’s book and this case serves to highlight that if you’re going to use the new tools of customer service, you’d better be serious about it.
Image credit: amandabhslater via Creative Commons on Flickr
