Valitics Blog

When it comes to customer satisfaction and customer relations, online tools can help businesses quickly and easily communicate with their customers. Contact forms and email links can give your customers a variety of easy ways to get in touch with you. FAQs and forums can enable your customers to answer common questions and solve common problems on their own. Online chat is another great tool for certain types of businesses looking to quickly and effectively interact with their customers online.

We have recently switched banks to a bank that offers this online chat. Obviously, nerdy guys like us are going to use a feature like that!  Considering how much we are online, that is a very convenient feature for us.  We have tried to use it several times. We always get a quick response from an bank employee on the other end when we submit an inquiry, but that person always says "can we just call you?" Okay, that's not so bad (I do wonder why they installed chat if they aren't dedicated to using it), but the real problem is that they usually don't call back quickly (if at all), and when they do call we have to re-explain the problem because it is not the same person we were originally chatting with.

This actually makes our problem (as the customer) even worse because, while the business makes an implied promise that they are available to help us online when we need it, they really aren't available and they usually can't help us with our problem when we need them to. Their online chat is working against them because it is making promises they can't/don't keep. I would much rather have a phone number that I could call and have a more typical customer/business interaction on our banking issues. For this bank, it seems like they added this feature because it was "cool," but day-to-day they aren't willing or able to use it as a viable communication/problem solving tool. And that just makes me frustrated. 

Online communication mechanisms (like online chat) are supposed to make these sort of interactions easier, faster and more convenient, but they don't manage and run themselves. They have to be supported!