I have been on the CSR empowerment bandwagon for years now. In most of my writing on customer support and customer experience, I strongly encourage organizations to empower their contact center personnel to make creative decisions that can rectify a bad customer experience. So imagine how pleased I was when a CSR was empowered to turn around a bad situation for me.
I received an email offer to shop at OneStopPlus.com, a clothing retail aggregator.
I like the site, and was delighted with the coupon offer of 30 percent off my first item, 40 percent off my third item, and 50 percent off my fifth item. So I went to the site and began shopping. I chose five items I liked (good) and that were on sale (better), and I looked forward to receiving the discounts on my first, third, and fifth items (best).
But when I checked out and applied the promotion code, only two items were discounted. I didn’t get the 50 percent off! I tried reapplying the code, deleting an item from the shopping cart and then adding it again, nothing got me that final discount. So I decided to call the customer service line and place the order that way, thinking it was an online glitch that wasn’t fulfilling the promised promotions.
If you look back at the promotion in the illustration above, you’ll see that there is no indication of that caveat to the offer. Nor was there anything about it in the shopping cart where I entered the code. So I was annoyed. The reason I had ordered five items was specifically to receive the discounts. In fact, I had searched long and hard to find the fifth item to fulfill the requirements. My gut reaction, cancel the order. Instead, I cancelled the item from the manufacturer (at full price, it was too expensive) along with the fifth item, thus still getting the 30 and 40 percent discounts, but saving some money. It also meant a smaller sale for OneStopPlus. The sales person was very smart. He offered to transfer me to customer service along with my order. He wasn’t empowered to do anything about the promotion, but perhaps the CSR could. He didn’t know, but it couldn’t hurt.
He transferred me directly. The CSR had my order, and I explained why I was annoyed and why I had reduced the number of items to buy. She understood my issue immediately. Instead of just saying “sorry,” she went to investigate what might be done. In just a minute, she came back on the line and said that, for this time only, if I added the two items back into my cart, she would be able to give me a discount on the item direct from manufacturer, and she would give me the 50 percent off on that item. I was delighted—as the highest priced item in the order, I only expected 30 percent off.
She also really listened when I explained that it was bad policy not to inform customers that there are restrictions on promotions. We actually spent about five minutes figuring out where the best place would be to put in the restriction—we agreed that there should be a notice under (or above) the box where you enter the promotional code you want to use stating that they don’t apply to items direct from the manufacturer. She assured me that the suggestion would be escalated to the right people
So, in the end, I added the items back, got my full discounts, and left feeling well valued and hopeful that the site would actually implement the restriction notice. And I was delighted that the CSR had been empowered by her company to truly provide an excellent customer experience—not to mention, convert a smaller sale to a much larger one. I will go back to the site again, and, look, I’m telling all my friends! What better PR can there be? It is worth far more than a 50 percent discount on a single item.
