Daily Dose of English 84
Customer Service
Daily Dose of English 84
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you can make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about customer service. Customer service isn't something that you usually want to deal with when you have to go talk to somebody from a company because you have some sort of issue. And it's usually not a great experience is how most people think of it, which is not a great thing, I guess. It might also be called customer support or just support, but it's all the same thing. helping customers fix some sort of issue or avoiding the issue if you're the company usually. I originally put this idea down because I had a bad experience with customer service and I was very annoyed and so I wrote down this topic but thankfully since then Um, they actually kind of got back to me and we fixed things and it was great. So I'm not upset anymore, but I still think it's good to talk about. So customer service is interesting and I feel like I have a bit more to say since I've worked on both sides. I've had to deal with customer service in several different countries and I've seen the other side of things. I've seen what it's like to have to respond to things and have to help people and that sort of thing. Thankfully, I'm grateful that that is not my job. I don't have to do that every single day. And so I only know about it in passing. That's not like a constant thing that I do every single day. But let's just start with kind of the purpose of customer service. And it's really to make sure that the people that go to buy your products are getting what they bought, what they want, and that sort of thing to make sure that people don't get upset with your company if something goes wrong. It's especially important for bigger and bigger companies because they have more and more things that will go wrong, not can go wrong, will go wrong. There's something that always will go wrong no matter what. And so having customer service and support that is going to take care of those things is very important or else people won't want to use your service. If there's, for example, like let's take a shipping company, for example, if one in 100 of your packages just didn't get delivered, they never got delivered correctly, and people knew that and knew that nothing ever happened, they wouldn't really want to use your service. they talk to each other and say, oh, don't use this company because they'll lose your package every so often. And they don't do anything about it. You have to figure it out yourself. That'd be a terrible experience, and so nobody would want to do that. Unless it's a monopoly, but we can talk about that another time. And so having a customer service sector or team is really important for the success of a company in many ways. Other ways that it can happen are just if like customers have questions or they need help, right? A common problem that I have, regrettably, it's happened many times, is like phone problems, right? If your phone isn't working, And so you need to call the service provider and be like, hey, my service isn't working. I didn't do anything. Can you fix this, please? Because I'm paying you for service. And so they have to figure out what to do and they have to help you get through the problem. And the quality of the support is often will decide whether or not the person will continue to purchase your service, right? If something just doesn't work, you're not gonna keep paying for it because it's not working, right? And so that can also be very important. Some places are famous for their customer service. In the US, there's Best Buy, who has the Geek Squad, it's actually a sort of famous customer service group. and they'll fix your and work on your computer. They do have a price that you charge unless you buy something from Best Buy. But that's a good example of sort of customer service being usually pretty good. They're not amazing. They're not the best, but they are pretty good. There's also like the Apple Genius Bar is also a well-known one of people that will help you with your Apple products if you could bring it in and you can make appointments and that sort of thing. And so many large companies are known for having good customer service. However, many are known for also having terrible customer service because a lot of companies also don't want to help you. They just want your money. They don't actually care if you have service or not or whether your thing works. They just want your money, right? That's what a company does. And so it can be very frustrating trying to do something. And so, for example, what I was trying to do was figure out a cost that came up and taxes that came up. And they weren't very helpful at first. They were like, oh, it said on our website, this little piece down here that wasn't very clear, that part. Yeah, that's what we put on the website to warn you. But like that's not that helpful. And so as a regular person, if you just go through the regular process of buying something and you don't like look at every single word on the page, you're gonna miss some things. And so they end up having like feeling like they didn't do anything wrong, but then you're like, well, no, that's not fair necessarily. Like why should I have to pay for something that you didn't really tell me about? And so that's what happened to me basically. And so I was chatting with them, not on phone, like just on text, because that's usually easier nowadays. For some things, getting on a call is much, much better. And so yeah, I was chatting about that. And then thankfully, a couple days later, because at the end of the conversation, they were like, okay, let me go talk to the team, and then I'll get back to you. And they came back a couple days later and like, yeah, no, that's fine. We can figure this out. We can fix this. And so that was really nice from that customer service point of view. Another time that customer service was really nice was actually calling. So this is the opposite of the messaging thing. I had an issue with my phone where it wasn't connecting to service at all. It was completely disconnected from service for a while and I tried with three different people via chat to figure out what the issue was. I would go through the entire process, I would give them all the information, and they would tell me to do something that wouldn't work. And then I would ask them a question, they would say one thing, and then it wouldn't work, and then I'd be like, why did you tell me that thing then? They'd go, oh, that wouldn't work, why would I tell you that? I'm like, you did tell me that. Anyways, now I'm getting upset. The point is, sometimes text chat is much worse because you can't actually talk to a person to help you with your issue. Because after failing to solve my issue with three people, I eventually had a phone call with somebody, with a different person from the support, and she fixed my issue in like 15 minutes. It was so much easier to talk to somebody because I could actually tell her things. I could be like, hey, I've already done all of the normal stuff with three other people. I promise you that we've done the regular things. Can we try something else? And she was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, let's do that. And so it's much better if you can to call. The other thing about customer service is when you're trying to cancel something, and cancel a service can be very annoying. A couple of months ago, I needed to cancel an internet service, and the person who was helping me, or helping me, I put that in big quotes, they were attempting to help me to cancel my service, kept trying to get me to keep buying it. They're like, oh, we'll make it cheaper. Oh, we'll make it better. Oh, we can do this. Oh, we can do that. I'm like, no, I literally am going to be paying for your service in a different place. Cancel this. Cancel this. Cancel this. Like, oh, but it's going to cost you this much. Just cancel the, so sometimes customer service can be fricking terrible because they just want to sell you more things and it's very annoying. And so I feel like this episode is very weird. I'm kind of just been complaining about customer service and telling strange stories. So I hope that that's not awful, I guess. I didn't really know what else to talk about when I put down the customer service topic for today. And so I hope that maybe you learned something here or there, some new words potentially. I don't think I really used anything that interesting of words. Maybe. I'm not really aware of everything that I say all the time. But yeah, that's pretty much all that I have for this episode. I don't really want to keep talking about customer service. But I hope that you enjoyed and didn't find this episode too annoying. And I thank you so very much for watching. And let me know if you had any experiences that were interesting with customer service. And then I'll see you again tomorrow. Have a good one. Bye.
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