Whenever I call my bank, the customer service rep asks, “And how is your business doing today?”
1. My business is none of yours.
2. You don’t care. You’re asking only because some consulting genius convinced Wells Fargo’s management it would be a good idea — pretending to care about how my business is doing.
Probably like most of your customers, I want to take care of my bank-by-phone business as quickly as possible. Being forced to engage in ridiculous and meaningless small talk wastes my time.
If indeed time is money, then this policy wastes my money and causes my business to “do” worse; I’m answering your insincere question (to which you reply, “Good, good”) instead of concentrating on my business.
Kinda like the radio stations that take 45 seconds to tell listeners they spend less time talking and more time playing music.
Kinda like the radio stations that say, “We want to know what YOU think” but never answer their studio lines or respond to emails.
You don’t prove you care by saying you care; you prove it by showing it.
Comments on this entry are closed.
Amen Dan…couldn’t have said it any better.
While answering a somewhat rhetorical question with a comparable benign answer doesn’t get right to the reason you called, you make a fundamentally wrong claim with “number 1”.
Your business IS their business. Without your business, theirs doesn’t exist.
Much more so than the other way around.
I think Dan is referring to the script the guy on the other end of the phone is forced to read in order to make you feel special. They really want you to think they care. I would if it weren’t so obvious they are reading the courtesies off a computer screen.
“Mr O’Day, thank you for calling WF Bank. My name is Joshua, but you can call me Josh. It is my pleasure to serve you today. And, what a lovely day it is today. I see the weather is, uh, sun-nie in Sac-ree-men-toe. I hope you are doing well, and I hope your business is prospering today, and your wife and 2.5 children are happy and content. Can we be friends? blah blah blah”
Ok, HOW MANY TIMES have you seen a jock walk into the studio to begin a shift, and the very first thing they do is put all the phone lines on hold, and keep them that way for 4 hours? Yeah, I’ve worked with those losers too. The flip side is that I’ve also worked with Romeo wanna be jocks who spent their entire shift yapping on the phone and paying little, if any attention to their air shift. Which is worse? What makes everything worse is the weak management that tolerates this from their jocks.