Understanding Customer Service Calls

Great technology, but before you can have good customer service, mustn't the caller first speak with a live human being at the other end?

And what might have been a call from a mildly annoyed customer at the outset ends up with a furious customer who has been forced to wade through a voice-menu labyrinth a mile deep only to discover he or she mistakenly chose option #2 twelve levels back. And what about all the customers who finally hang up in disgust after having been on hold for the better part of an hour? Does this system analyze them?

No matter how fabulous the technology nor how great its potential market, this technology is not designed with better customer service in mind. Not at all! Its focus, like that of the voice-menu system, is all about growing the Bottom Line. About corporate greed. In the final analysis, isn't that always the Real Bottom Line? Real Customer Service takes people and costs money - and there aren't any shortcuts!

The Customer be damned. Long live Greed!

-e

I'm totally with you! .. the advent of the 'automated phone answering' systems employed by companies is the single worst thing to happen to business in the US in my lifetime. I typically just hang up, curse, and try to find a company that has PEOPLE in it....

When I encounter the AVR statement "Your call may be recorded or monitored for training purposes" I always say "I certainly hope so!"

Emotional trigger number 1-

"---Please listen carefully as our menus have changed---"

ARRRGGGG!

One company whose collective head is so far up its ass in terms of customer service is my local ISP. Their voice-menu system is so bad that it actively discourages customers from paying the company for its services! And wouldn't you also think that an ISP - especially an ISP - should know something about webpage design? Not so! Their online-payment links don't work at all. The only alternatives are snail-mail and making payments in person.

For my part, I think my ISP shows all the signs of having a death wish.

-e

Stop supporting them. As long as you remain a customer why should they change?

About 15 years ago I saw the results when a computer company decided it would centralize the logging of service calls. The problem was that the people taking the calls weren't technical minded and the sort of information coming from the call center to the field engineers was useless. They ended up having to post a senior engineer in the call center full time to talk with customers in an attempt to massage the required information from the callers. The work was rotated through all the senior engineers and was the most hated job of all.

Automated Customer Service is really dumb. I never get road rage, but I've gotten phone rage more times than I can count, despite my efforts to restrain myself. I think If I could get a hold of the time warner cable automated customer service server and smash it to bits with a baseball bat, while on the phone with it and actually get to hear it die halfway through explaining 8 choices that don't apply to me, I mean, wow, that might be heaven. And yes I know how insane that sounds and I'm not even exaggerating a little bit.

Time-Warner Cable. What a coincidence.

Too bad you can't actually do stuff through the phone like that. If you vicariously smash the place to smithereens, you're gonna need a clean-up crew: How's about I send them Texas' entire fire ant population? Kill two birds with one phone.

-e

(Speaking of customer service, though not necessarily via telephone...) I went to the local Wal Mart Supercenter yesterday to buy a camera battery. Only two checkout lanes were open, forcing customers to form long queues which backed way into the aisles. Apathetic employees shuffled here and there, stopped and chatted, went outside for a cigarette, or went about their business in the most unhurried way. The other 21 lanes remained closed. I've seen this time and time again in Wal Mart stores across the country. (The Grand Prize, however, goes to the Severance Shopping Center Wal Mart in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. I guarantee that if Sam Walton were alive today, he'd shit bales of razor wire to see the trashed condition of that store and the unabashed "f__k you" attitude of its employees.) You can also be sure that if Wal Mart had begun with its present-day cavalier attitudes toward its customers, it would be just another blip in Bentonville's litany of failed businesses. Perhaps they aim to end that way someday.

Rule #1: f you don't take care of the Customer, someone else will.

(Target had my battery.)

-e

That would be a great challenge. I hope the best success.

I could see some similarities with your idea and some HR managers. HR professionals have been trying to find a way to measure their performance as a department within their organization. I think they refer to it as "HR Metrics".

The largest challenge to this is quantitifying the data. People (in general) are dynamic while most evaluation systems are not or have a complicated equation that has to be used.

The other challenge is how to measure the data:

A polygraph does not detect lies. It simply monitors some of your body's functions and graphs them for a technician to review. The technician compares that data with the data collected when you were asked questions that you could not lie to (kind of a calibration system).

When customers call they are already upset and it might be difficult to monitor that process because the machine does not have the data about when the caller was happy.

Peoples reactions are not the same and may vary in degree. Some people might be able to compose themselves better and on the extreme side might want to fly off the handle.

Please keep in touch with me on this project. I am studying HR management and operations managment and if there is anyway to help you in developing a system for data collection, analysis and interpretation let me know. I might have some college professors who have some ideas or might want to help as well.

You can contact me through my company's website @ www.dustcollectionsystemsinc.com just send me an email.