AAA poor customer service lesson

I am a member of AAA and I have used their service when my car would not start and I needed to have it towed. The service was great. I called the number and was immediately sent to a customer service rep to help me. Beautiful. This is how to take care of your customer.

You are saying, "hey wait, the title of this blog post is "AAA poor customer service lesson". What gives?" Here is my answer.

AAA mailed me a sales letter saying they were auto-renewing my membership using my credit card and I could upgrade by calling the 1-800 upgrade number they gave me. I decided I wanted to upgrade my membership to include my motorcycles and some other upgrade features, so I called. Here is where the poor customer service begins...

First, upon calling the number, I am put through menu selection hell. You know, press 1 for this, press 2 for that, blah blah blah. Okay, so after about 1-2 minutes of going through menus I finally get to the membership upgrade option. I press it and then a voice says it will be a 15 minute wait and I should go to their website. Funny thing is the sales letter they sent me stated I should call their 800 number to upgrade - NOT go to their website. Their website upgrade URL is not even printed anywhere on the sales letter. So now I am on hold and my valuable time is being wasted. So I hang up. Later that same day I call again hoping for better luck. No such luck. Same menu selection hell, same wait 15 minutes before I can talk to a live customer service rep. So, in frustration I hang up again. AAA had a customer who wanted to upgrade and give them my money but I was not worth their time to have a live rep answer the phone and take my order.

Now ask yourself, as a customer who is giving a company your hard earned money, should you be treated like this? Should you have to go through menu option hell and then be put on hold for 15 minutes so you can give a business your money? My answer is NO! I thought AAA was a great company with great service until I had to deal with this nonsense. Now I am not going to upgrade my membership and I will no longer recommend AAA to other people. And, I posted this blog which will likely be read by thousands of people who will rethink joining AAA. Rather expensive mistake for AAA, don't you agree?

Lesson learned is this: When you are a company it is an HONOR for you to sell your product/service to customers. People do not have to buy from your company. They owe you nothing. Therefore, when a customer wants to do business with you and give you their hard earned money, do not make them jump through hoops to buy from you. make buying from you as fast and easy as possible. And, if you own a company that treats your customers poorly, those angry customers can use the Internet with social networking (like I am doing here) to spread the word to millions of people telling them not to do business with you.

Hopefully AAA is smart enough to monitor their name as it is posted on the internet and they will fix their poor customer service for people wanting to become a new member or to upgrade their account.

I hope you learned what NOT to do in this blog post and AAA learns what they should be doing.

To your business success!

Peter Geisheker, CEO
The Geisheker Group marketing firm
http://www.geisheker.com
(920) 471-1638
"We don't help you compete, we help you dominate!"