Scenario:
Step one is that a customer has an issue and contacts Customer service online. The automated system may be automated but it is limited, and it cannot deal with the issue.

Step two is that the customer asks to speak with a human being, and after some circular moves, is connected.

Customer service: "Please don't worry , as you are with me now , I’m here to help you, and I’ll take care of this right away to make things easier.Could you please allow me a moment to check this for you and make your day easy?"

Of course there are differences of approach and expression in different cultures and countries, and in some cultures and in some circumstances, words of reassurance help.

But in some cases they have become synonymous with platitudes coupled with an inability to grasp the needs of the customer or to deal with the issue.

So then what starts out as what could be imagined as a positive beginning turns into a yawning gap as the customer realises that the Customer Service person cannot grasp the issue even when expressed in straightforward English.

And then the next time around, when a Customer Service agent begins an interaction like this, it becomes shorthand to the customer that the customer service agent may not be adequate to help with the issue.

It's like putting the Junior on the reception desk in a professional office. He or she has a poor grasp of the service that the office offers, and is ill equipped to guide an enquiry from a new prospective client.

It's like giving an untrained person the task of diagnosing ailments in patients when they arrive at a hospital.

 "Please don't worry , as you are with me now , I’m here to help you, and I’ll take care of this right away to make things easier.Could you please allow me a moment to check this for you and make your day easy?"

It's like having an untrained person on the phone at a crisis centre.

"Please don't worry , as you are with me now , I’m here to help you, and I’ll take care of this right away to make things easier.Could you please allow me a moment to check this for you and make your day easy?"

Who knows, but the most likely scenario is that customers or patients need a solution and so they will hang around until their issue is resolved.

Of course, customers are not the same as patients. Patients are stuck with their ailments. They do not have the choice of simply deciding not to have ailments.

But customers can simply say no to a business and shop elsewhere or not at all. Then businesses would have a hard time judging whether there is a problem building up. The crunch would come when a lot of customers simply stop being customers because they cannot face the possibility of a bad customer service experience.

Is it worth it for a business to think that this might happen and to devote more time to training customer service agents? The cost of training is surely less than the cost of a mass exodus of customers.

This is where the ability to analyse data is important, and from what I understand of the head of Amazon, this is his forte. So why is their customer service so bad sometimes?