Your phone rings Monday around lunchtime and you see on your caller ID that it’s one of your restaurant clients. He didn’t even say hello. He was practically yelling over the clatter of plates and shouting kitchen orders.
“My terminal says ‘COMM ERROR’ and is locked up! I’ve got people standing in line for the lunch rush and nobody can pay. How fast can you get here?”
Take a moment to take that all in. Ok, so you throw the car in drive and head there ASAP.
When I walked through the door the place was pacekd. The line was backed up 4 or 5 deep. Some looking for cash and the owner was standing behind the counter sweating bullets through his apron while trying to deal with support.
His phone was blasting that hold music for the whole dining room to hear, interrupted every ninety seconds by that robotic voice “We are currently experiencing higher than normal call volume. Your call is very important to us. Estimated wait time is… 9 minutes. Did you know you can troubleshoot most issues at our online help portal?”
An online help portal. While customers are holding credit cards and waiting yp pay for their lunches.
By minute ten of hold time, two groups gave up and walked out the door. The owner looked like he was about to throw the phone through the front window.
There is a special kind of hell reserved for standing in a restaurant during a busy lunch rush while stuck on Bluetooth or speakerphone listening to scratchy or distorted elevator music.
Here’s the Confession or Rant
Standing there watching that unfold gave me pure unfiltered rage, not at the owner, but at this industry.
All these large ISO’s love to brag in their glossy brochures about “24/7 support.” But when the rubber meets the road on Main Street, 24/7 support means a call center four time zones away that puts you on hold while your business bleeds cash.
I didn’t wait for their support rep to answer. I walked behind the counter, pulled a spare terminal out of my bag, swapped terminals and had him up and running again in under four minutes.
Then I reached over and hung up the phone for him.
The Lesson
If you’re out knocking on doors today, remember this: small business owners don’t buy from you because of a 0.05% rate drop or a fancy sales pitch.
They buy it because when their hardware dies during a Monday lunch rush, they don’t want or do I a 45 minute hold music nightmare. They want a real person who picks up his cell phone or respond to a text and shows up when they need you.
How many times have you had to rescue a client from a customer service nightmare? How did you handle it?
Happy Selling,
David
