Great customer service can help businesses to acquire new customers. I’m sure you all have good and bad customer service stories to share. Here’s our latest experience…

Our 888 number provider made some changes/upgrades to their system a few days/weeks ago. Our toll free number suddenly became unavailable for Canadian callers: “the number you have reached is not in service”. The major problem was reported by a potential customer who emailed us “Are you guys closing your business?”.

We called the provider’s customer service center and were told that Canadian phone companies have banned some providers because of “caller ID forwarding issues” and we need contact the Canadian phone companies to fix the issue. What? Really? Non sense. If the customer representative was right, we would need to spend money to change all our business cards, letterheads, etc. After wasting precious time, I hung up the phone and decided to investigate on my own. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find any details about this issue…

I then emailed the company’s customer service saying that I would blog about the problem. I received a quick reply a few hours later:

Although the issue is still under the investigation we believe that there was a routing issue that caused the calls from Canadian numbers to fail. We changed the routing to correct it. Please re-test your toll free number and simply reply to this email to let me know the result. Thank you in advance.

The problem was indeed fixed. It wasn’t about Canadian phone companies or any “caller ID forwarding issues”…

We decided to keep our service provider and hope that it won’t happen again. However, we need to remember two important things:

1. Bad customer service will drag your company down: unsatisfied customers will spread the word and you will lose customers.
2. On the other hand, great customer service can bring more customers and help your business to grow.

Customer service is the new marketing and businesses need to understand the importance of this reality.