“Hi Sir, I’m <name> calling from <online grocery>. We just spoke via customer care number. I’m sorry to call you back from my personal phone, but…”
How often will you go out of the way to do something good? A kind soul, who is working as a customer care representative for an online grocery store, did just that with me. I’m thankful for his candor and his braveness. By calling me back, I’m sure he might have broken some rules, but he did so with the good intention of ‘customer care’ in his mind.
‘Technical Glitch!’
Long story short: I’m having trouble with the delivery of online grocery items. The online grocery store continues to cancel my orders on the day of the scheduled delivery. This happened three times. When I contacted the customer care on the first two occasions, they assured me that it is just a ‘technical glitch’ and encouraged me to reorder. But my reorders also got cancelled. The third time, I got this customer care person on the phone and he repeated all the ‘right things’ to me and hung up.
A Surprise Call-back
Then I received a call back from him, from his personal number! He hurriedly mentioned that there are some problems with the grocery online platform; it will take some time to get those rectified and my current reorder also will not reach me on the scheduled date. Since he saw my bulk order for milk in all the cancelled orders, he requested me to go out and purchase milk from a shop rather than waiting endlessly for the online order delivery. He couldn’t say this earlier to me because all the calls to customer care are monitored/recorded.
Empowering Customer Care People
Girish Mathrubootham (CEO of FreshWorks), in his YourStory MobileSparks 2015 talk, rightly said about empowering customer support people to take decisions keeping in mind what is right for the customer. I was in attendance for his talk.
My experience is a proof of that thinking. Customer care representatives are humans too and there is goodness everywhere.
