One of the fundamental elements of customer service is to listen to your customers. Your job, as the person providing the service, is to translate the customer’s inquiry into an action you can carry out that will satisfy the customer’s need. When a customer successfully completes a task quickly, efficiently, and with as little trouble as possible, the customer rewards your company with customer loyalty, which in return strengthens your company’s bottom line.
So, how did Emusic get this so horribly wrong? It might help to provide a little background.
Last night, I visited the Emusic site to download a copy of Missile, the latest album from The Dears (so far I’d give it 3 out of 4 stars). When you download selections from Emusic, a small file is downloaded onto your computer, which is then read by their download manager software. I was having problems with my download because the software kept crashing in the middle of the transmission. I noticed that the tracks had been debited from my monthly downloads, and wrote to Emusic to ask that they credit the 10 tracks back to my account.
When contacting the service through their website, you have to indicate the version of the Emusic software you’re using, the mp3 software you’re using, and your operating system. I did exactly that, and wrote to the company and asked that they credit the 10 downloads to my account.
Pretty straightforward, no? You’d think that any customer service agent who actually took time to read the message would understand the nature of my question and reply accordingly, but apparently Emusic only hires people whose reading comprehension skills don’t go beyond the first grade. This is part of the response I received from them:
After uninstalling Remote, please click the link below to install the previous version of our software:
http://www.emusic.com/dlm/3.0/windows/eMusicDownloadManager.exe
If you are still experiencing difficulty, please reply with further details including:
- Type/version of media player installed
- Was player already open when you started downloading or did the first track open it up?
- Approximate size of library (i.e. number of songs)
- System Infomation: memory, speed, etc
-any error messages you are seeing or any other observations that will help us solve your issueWe apologize for any frustration this issue may have caused.
Their first mistake? Telling me to download Windows software when I indicated I was using a Macintosh.
The second? Asking for system information which I provided when I first completed their form!
Stunned by the level of incompetence, I wrote them back complaining about the level of service and their failure to answer my question. A reply came back immediately which — you guessed it — once again suggested that I download the Windows version of their software!
Emusic.com, you’ve failed. This interaction showed me that my problem isn’t important enough for your customer service agent to take two minutes to actually read my question and reply accordingly. I don’t even merit editing the email script to remove the bits that don’t apply to my system setup. This is the second time I’ve canceled an account, but I won’t be back again.
Now if only Amazon.ca would hurry up and get music downloads working here…
