Death by SMS

By: Nathalie Schooling

Technology is a wonderful enabler of fast and effective communication. It allows businesses to stay in touch with their customers and can significantly enhance the overall customer experience. It is also a brilliant response mechanism by which to let your customers provide you with input, and let them know that they’ve been heard.

But in the hands of the overzealous, technology can also very quickly kill what could have been a positive customer experience, as I discovered recently when I took my car back to the dealership to have a “nagging issue” repaired.

Soon after I left the premises, I received my first SMS thanking me for entrusting my vehicle to them. “That’s nice,” I thought, “this business clearly understands the importance of creating positive customer experiences by keeping their customers in the loop.”

When I received the second SMS not more than an hour later, I experienced my first niggling suspicions about the wisdom displayed by the company in putting whoever they did on ‘Customer SMS duty’.

My suspicion proved correct. Over the next 24 hours, I was subjected to a veritable barrage of text messages.

Unfortunately, my smartphone is a business tool, so when it notifies me that an SMS has been received, I have to check it. As a result, by the end of my car service experience, I felt more than a little like Pavlov’s Dog, except every response I made didn’t result in reward – just increasing levels of irritation and a growing feeling that I was not being seen as a person, but rather just a cellphone number plugged into a computerized text messaging system.

This, clearly, is not the response any business wants to their efforts to deliver service excellence or a positive customer experience. As a customer service fanatic, I hate bad service. But I also believe that you can try and deliver too much of a good thing – to the point that your service efforts go from being useful to the client to just being downright annoying.

Ultimately, creating the perfectly positive customer experience requires an approach that carefully balances adequate customer attention and communication with an understanding of that customer’s desire for space and privacy. Oh, and a small pinch of sincerity can also go a very long way.