Nobody wants to spend eternity on the phone to a robot.
It may not come as a surprise to small business holders, but in a recent survey by Cisco, utility companies were ranked among the worst for customer service by members of the Small and Medium-size Enterprise (SME) community. Green energy blog Greenbang reported that a survey of Britain’s SMEs carried out in February ranked business energy providers as second to bottom in terms of customer service – just ahead of rail firms.
As a business owner, you know how vital good customer service is. The importance of providing a positive and helpful customer service experience is, if anything, even more important to a small business than to a giant multinational – and the results of a positive or negative experience is much more likely to feed back, in terms of customer retention and recommendation. Both of these are vital in keeping you in business.
I know of a garage where customers keep bringing their cars back year on year, and sending all their friends and family, because of the positive and prompt service they receive from the family who run the business. Everybody knows a story like this, and it’s what every business is aiming for.
But business energy suppliers appear to be failing.
There is nothing more frustrating than trying to contact your business energy supplier, for example to check your contract renewal date, only to find yourself greeted by a robotic voice that asks you to ‘Choose from the following options’ – press 1 to speak to another robot.
Being stuck on hold for hours while trying to talk to your business electricity or gas supplier just isn’t practical in terms of time or money. Imagine if you had to do that with all business energy suppliers!
That’s where contacting independent price comparison sites such as Energy Advice Line can really help. EAL pride themselves on excellent customer service, and helping small business owners get the best deals for their business energy contracts.
Energy Advice Line will do the hard work for you, contacting all business energy suppliers and presenting you with the options for your business gas and business electricity contracts. EAL are in constant contact with energy companies to ensure they have the very latest prices.
They can cut through the call centre queues for customers with mid-contract billing queries, too.
What’s more, you’ll speak to an experienced, knowledgeable advisor, who can take you through the contract switching process step by step – with no robots in sight!
Read the GreenBang story here.
Information on Cisco here
Picture credit: Robot Telephone by alexkerhead from Flickr
Had a bad customer service experience? Share it with us using the comments on this blog! Which industries have the best, and worst, customer service providers?
Tags: Business Electricity, Business Energy, Business Gas, Customer stories
