There are many bad options, but the worst has to be that terrible phrase…. ‘I can only apologise, but………’ .
I’ve just had a dose of that phrase from O2 explaining why my GPRS service had not been working for a week, something to do with an engineer forgetting to do something at their end. So……i’m supposed to do without a service I pay for, spend over an hour tracking down someone prepared to resolve the issue and then another day before the service works again. And i’m supposed to feel better about it because someone ‘can only apologise’. Frankly I think they should do a lot more than that, like pay for my time, give me a credit for the service I did not receive; but no that does not seem to be an option.
Over the years, i’ve had the same wonderful phrase from BT, Scottish Power, British Gas, Apple and no doubt a plenty more i’ve forgotten. Perhaps Siebel or Salesforce.com could build the capability for a service rep to automate the phrase being dropped into a customer conversation at the appropriate time while they move on to the next call> that would save a bit more money…..and why not, it would not make the customer feel much worse than they do when they hear the phrase from a person.
