Reality Check | Ephraim Schwartz » Only the best get a company's best service

June 25, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Only the best get a company's best service

TAGS: Business

I filed a story today on Nexidia, a company that has technology to analyze the quality of spoken English, as well as other languages, in order to assess whether or not someone speaks with enough clarity to be understood in a customer service setting.

Originally called Accent Analyzer, the name was changed to Language Assessor.

In researching the article I spoke with an industry analyst, Elizabeth Herrell, at Forrester Research and what she told me just ticked me off.

Herrell said that there is a trend called "right shoring", or "best shoring", which only connects a company's premier customers to native speakers if and when they need help.

If, however, you are a lowly, small-fry customer, they send you to a customer support representative [CSR] off shore, where both you and the CSR may struggle over getting and being understood.

How cynical can it get? Whatever happened to being proud of your product, and that should include customer support? So proud that you don’t want to give anyone second best service?

This has to come under the heading of "how low can you go?" It also puts the lie to any company uses best shoring but claims its customers come first.

I would suggest before you purchase any big ticket item that may need help you should ask if the company does indeed use a "best shoring" strategy for their customer support.

If they do use right shoring, you might want to look elsewhere because if that's how they treat their customers I wouldn't be to sure of the quality of the rest of the product either.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on June 25, 2007 03:12 PM

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