Timely Feedback Collection

Spoke too soon. In the last post, we mentioned that PayPal did not send a follow up survey to a customer service issue, when the automated response did not provide any adequate information regarding a customer inquiry. Well it turns out that they did, just a few days later. While we commend PayPal for collecting data on their own customer service system, we still have some issues with their customer service.

There's a valid reason to wait to send a survey about the results of a customer service inquiry. For example, perhaps the answer the company provided needs a few days before it's known whether the answer is a success. Or perhaps the company already sends too many emails and waiting ensures that the company doesn't seem like it's spamming the customer.

But in this case, it's questionable how much waiting really benefits PayPal. At best, waiting doesn't make a difference. At worse, the feedback is forgotten or these emails are used as phishing spam.

Waiting one or two days may be too long, especially if the answer was inadequate, which brings us to number two:

As we established, PayPal gave a really bad answer to the inquiry – the answer had nothing to do with the customer's question. Once PayPal gathered feedback, one would think that they would see that the results of their customer service were poor and respond accordingly, perhaps giving the customer's question greater thought or consideration. Once again, no such follow up occurred.

As of this writing, the question was still left unanswered. This is a missed opportunity. A customer that fills out these forms is quite literally telling your company that it failed in its customer service responsibilities, and that represents a great chance to follow up and save the relationship with the customer.

Again, in PayPal's case perhaps it is not important, since in many ways they monopolize the online banking world. But other companies need to learn from the things that PayPal is doing right and wrong. They thankfully followed up on their poor customer service answer (albeit a few days later), but they still fell short of delivering quality customer service and the question remained unanswered.

With this, they also introduce another issue, which we'll show in problem number three. We'll continue with these issues and end with some closing thoughts in the next article.