May 1st, 2009 by Anitale

Here are some thoughts on customer care, triggered by a bad experience that happened to me.
Customer care includes technical support, several kind of inquiries, shipping statuses, billing, feedback and much more. Customer care can literally make or break your business. Of course, the type of customer care your Website offers depends on the product or service you sell. Satisfy and help the customer before and after the sale/service and you will attract new customers to your website, and keep them coming back for more.

So, that leads me to…
…that bad experience I had with Eurostar. Couldn’t buy my ticket online because one of the address lines didn’t accept my address or any other address. Without address no ticket. And you know, if you don’t buy your ticket way in advance you can pay 5 times the price.
So I decided to call the Customer Care: A robot told me, that the number is no longer valid and gave me another one. The other number does not work at all.
There is that option to send an email. But you know how that ends. You will get an answer when the cheapest ticket is no longer available.
Since I am a twitter user I twitted a big HELP! No reaction. I thought a big company like Eurostar would perhaps track their name. But it seems that I am wrong.
And I kind of understand why they don’t track their name.
There is only one train going from Paris to London. That means there is no competitor. Flying is not an option. It would take so much longer and is more expensive.

Lucky Eurostar!

But what if there would be a competitor?
What if my tweets would have an influence on my followers and their followers?
What if all these people would turn to the competitor?

Customer Care means they should care about what people say.
Every company holds a statistic about incoming complaints. But most of the time people do not complain that way.
They complain on their blog, twitter, in their online community. That’s how they spread their discontent.
And so many companies can’t afford to destroy their brand’s reputation.

To make it short, I would have liked to get feedback and help. Lucky Eurostar! No competitor and I have very few followers on twitter.

I had to buy my ticket on my old Eurostar account. That means my billing address (that I couldn’t change) is my old address in Paris and I had to pay the ticket in Euro. Which means I’ll have to pay a percentage on my Visa card purchase.