Bad Customer Service Horror Stories Watch Out Or Bloggers Will Be All Over It

Writen by Tino Buntic

If you're in business today you best be watchful of your company's customer service, whether it be customer service via telephone, call centers, face-to-face, email, snail mail, or fax. Everybody loves to tell their customer service horror stories, including bloggers. But bloggers have a viral tool in their customer service wars; they can publish their stories on the internet for the whole world to see.

Take care of your customers, give great service, and you won't have a problem, unlike the following companies that were recently written about in blogs due to their bad customer service. How's this for customer service horror stories:

• Don't travel British Airways unless you're referred to as Her Majesty: A blogger's sister was traveling to The United States, from India, via British Airways. British Airways required her to complete a food form on preferred food. On the flight, despite completing her food form well in advance, they had no food for her. The flight attendant suggested she share her food tray with the Indian guy beside her. I doubt Her Majesty would be asked to share her food tray.
• Don't you dare try to cancel your AOL account: Apparantly, one of the most difficult things to do is cancel your AOL account. One blogger, having heard about AOL customer service horror stories, decided to tape his telephone call when he called AOL's customer service to cancel his account. The telephone recording made its rounds on the internet and has become hugely popular. AOL doesn't let you cancel. They go as far as being straight out rude and calling their customers' liars. It's right there on the recording. Solution: Don't bother signing up with AOL in the first place.
• Don't put quarters into Wal-Mart gumball machines: One blogger wrote about being given a hard time when he asked a cashier to change a one dollar bill so that he could buy candy for his daughter from the gumball machines at the front of his store. He put a quarter in the machine. The machine got stuck and he couldn't retrieve his quarter. He wanted the quarter back, not for the money but for the principle. Wal-Mart's customer service asked him to complete a form before they could give him back his quarter.
• Not in stock. Would you like a rain-check?: In one blogger's opinion, whenever grocery chain, Kroger, advertises an item to be on sale they never seem to have that item in stock when she visits the store. Readers get to read all about her dissatisfaction in her blog

As you can see, bad service these days gets noticed more than it did in pre-internet and pre-blog days. A dissatisfied customer can, now, tell the world about her experiences before getting a chance to cool off. Everybody has a bad customer service horror story. Let's just hope that if you're a business owner, there no bad stories about you.

Tino Buntic runs TradePals, a website providing free B2B sales leads without cold calling to business professionals across North America. Tino also enjoys reading blogs and two of his favorites include Lifehacker and Score More Sales.