On Thursday I received a very strange phone call on my work line. Caller ID indicated only that the call had been transfered to my desk from elsewhere within the company. In the past, this has almost always been the calling card of recruiters. They find my profile on LinkedIn but don’t have my phone number. They know I work at Yahoo!, however, so they call the receptionist and ask to be transfered to me.
This time was different, however. I answered the phone, “This is Ryan.” Booming from the other end of the line I heard, “RYAN” in a strong southern accent. What followed could only be described as 5 minutes of nonstop railing against Yahoo! Customer Care. This gentleman had lost the password to his Yahoo! Mail account and over the course of the last week felt he was being given the runaround by our support technicians, going as far as to say that they had been “rude and hateful” towards him.
Working on his last nerve, he somehow found out about Yahoo!’s “postmaster Ryan K”. I’m nearly certain he’s referring to Ryan Knight, the “Ryan K” who took over the Yahoo! Mail blog after I hung up my evangelism cape. He managed to find the number for the Yahoo! Sunnyvale office and asked the receptionist to connect him to “Ryan K”. There’s more than one, so I can only guess that the receptionist rolled the dice and transferred him to me. Fortunately, he found a sympathetic ear.
After listening to him throw the customer care group under the bus for 5 straight minutes, we finally got to the part of the phone call where he would let me participate in the conversation. I asked some questions to collect as much information as possible. I tried to explain some of what might have happened during his dealings with customer care. He explained how important his email account was and how frustrating dealing with our customer care group was. He wasn’t happy and he wanted to make sure I was keenly aware of that fact.
After about 10 minutes on the phone with him, however, something happened. He came to know that I understood his frustrations and that I was equally disappointed with the experience he had been going through. In that instant, the phone conversation immediately lightened up. We each cracked a few jokes, shared a couple of laughs, established some common ground. Over the course of the next 5 minutes I collected a little more information and told him that I’d work my backchannels to get him the help he needed. It was the full 180. He started the phone call with spite and venom and he finished the call hopeful that we’d have this situation resolved for him. He was appreciative and, dare I say it, a bit happier.
Whether you’re dealing with 250 users or 250 million users, you can’t service your customers without talking to them. I mean really talking to them, not handling them with a phone in one hand and a script in the other. Talk to them, get to know them, understand why they’re upset and then make it all better.
Are you giving us all permission to call you when we have a problem with Yahoo! Mail?
As you can see by my post, I have little choice in whether or not people call me when they have Yahoo! Mail problems.
It sounds like you handled the call like a true professional. I would be delighted if you would share some of these customer service stories with us over at http://clausmolleruk.blogspot.com
It is the blog of my father, Claus Moller, who invented the concept of “A Complaint Is a Gift” and the co-author of the book of the same name with Janelle Barlow. Right now, we’re looking for great stories about how you can handle customer complaints effectively to ensure that customers not only feel the issues are resolved to their satisfaction, but how it can also increase their loyalty. In general, the customers who complain are the ones who want to continue being customers and there is probably a likelihood that he will start telling his friends about how well you handled the situation.
Kind regards,
Casper
[...] ryan kennedy’s blog » Customer service starts with the customer This post reminded me what a pain in the ass it can be to get the run around at large companies, ahem. For this reason, I invite any of you that is experiencing the run-around with a Yahoo! property to tweet me at ‘duzins’. I’ll do my best to help! (tags: twitter yahoo customercare customer+service) [...]
WELL, Ryan K., maybe you can help me out, although somehow I doubt it. I don’t know how, but, about…a year ago (?)… I started receiving pornographic e-mails. You can tell they are pornographic by the subject line but the link is indirect. I tried unsubsribing but it didn’t work. I heard this makes it worse because that’s how they verify that your e-mail is correct. I get at least 5 a day. I don’t know how to get rid of them. I think I am going to have to shut down this e-mail account.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. I really don’t need e-mails with links to websites such as “Indian Sluts” and “Farm Whores”.
Thanks!!!
Yahoo customer serivice was never good…..& will never going to be!!
poor chap….could have chosen some good & reliable email service!! (i would suggest Hosted Exchange Soluation)
I have been trying for ten years to get a hold of somebody at Yahoo to tell them about my problems with Yahoo Mail. Funny thing is, these are problems that could be solved with software that would make Yahoo evangelists out of many end users. If nothing else, these are problems that could drive the sales of subscriptions to Yahoo’s premium services. To date, I’ve received a total of one reply from anybody within the Yahoo Mail team. It was disguised as an auto generated email telling me to sign up for Yahoo’s premium web mail services. The email recited the need to upgrade so I could eliminate the 10 megabyte limitation on the size of my free email in box. I don’t even remember when I last had to delete an email from my in box due to size limitations. It’s one thing to get an auto generated response. It’s another to get pointed to a solutions page in the archives that was written when Grover Cleveland was in office.
My specific needs, so you know, are not about size limitations in my inbox. They are about the inability to create a local backup of my giant email inbox. I’d like to burn a CD every once in a while full of all of the stuff in my Yahoomail, Hotmail, Gmail, and other inboxes.
If there were a utility to sort all of my mail into folders based on who sent them, this would also be a nice touch. That way, the monthly newsletters from XYZ corporation would be easy to give the old heave-ho.
Also, if the local backup copy of my email were easy to sort and search, I can probably think of other useful things I might do with that.
So far, Yahoo has no interest in hearing from me, or even in taking my money for premium web mail services. With utilities like iOpus iMacros around, one would think it would be a piece of cake to create a third party backup utility for all of the popular web mail services, subscription or otherwise. Shoot, you could even backup stuff on your facebook, myspace, pbwiki, bravenet, photobucket, flickr, google docs, and other online accounts. Oh well, so much for idle pipe dreams. Sure wish I knew how to program iMacros for myself.