Jodie Monger

Does your organization have customers with different expectations than they should?  How does that happen when your company should be setting proper expectations?  But, as you know, there are often gaps between what they think and what we think they should think.  The gaps often yield dissatisfied customers, high customer effort and more customer complaints than you’d like to get.

Recently I had the experience of being in one of these “gaps” when I needed some pest prevention work done to my home.  I jumped through several hoops, both financially (large upfront sum) and physically (items in my...

When people find out what I do for a living they inevitably tell me about some awful customer experience they’ve had and ask if I can ‘fix that company’.  From my perspective as a consumer, I can certainly empathize with their bad customer experience, but as a call center professional I understand the common missteps call centers make that unknowingly lead to these negative customer experiences.

Imagine that you want to purchase a home theater projector online.  You review the choices, pick it out, put everything you need into your cart and when you try to place the order, your credit card is declined.  Now you call customer service hoping to save all of the work you just invested.  The big help is that declines are usually due to daily credit card spending limitations, and to call the issuing bank.  After clearing up the confusion with the bank and calling customer service again to place...

It’s time to get a new TV so I went to my local electronics store see the choices.  I wanted to compare the options and then select which model, brand and type would best suit my needs.  I found a store salesperson that walked me through the choices and we focused on several models that would be ‘perfect’ for me.  We talked for about 15 minutes and I was left to make my decision.  It was only a minute before another customer came up to me and told me the exact opposite of what the salesperson had said.  The customer told me the model the salesperson recommended was about to be discontinued because of a quick bulb burnout, surmising that the salesperson ‘was probably just trying to move excess product’.

Delaying my purchase so I could do more research, I located a whole slew of communities and customer comments talking about the bulb problems with warnings to future customers that ‘they’d be disappointed’.  I also found suggestions of like brands and models that had better...

But if you try sometimes, you just might find you get —— a high amount customer effort and a lot of headaches.  I continue to be shocked about the customer experience dysfunction I witness in my everyday life.  I have no doubt that you know what I’m talking about.  We see the repetitive communication and process execution breakdowns that occur during the purchase of a product or service.  To the receiver, customer experience dysfunction feels like the company does not care about its customers and couldn’t care less if they develop (and keep) the relationship.

You can feel the customer experience dysfunction when I refer to a recent purchase where I was sidelined by backorders, late product deliveries, damaged goods, returns, and faulty replacements.  After two months and several attempts, the company could never get my order...