You're doing it wrong: call centers.

Source: http://bjoernvold.com/

 

Recently, a viral video recording of a customer service call gone terribly wrong made the rounds of the Internet.

http://gawker.com/youve-never-heard-a-customer-service-call-meltdown-qui-1299857467

When it was posted on Gawker, comments ranged from sympathy with the poor agent to agreement with the caller.

I enjoy reading comment sections, and since my profession and interest is call center training, I read through almost all the comments for this article. There were 2 that really stuck out in my mind:

1: "It's not surprising that customers snap and have meltdowns like this — the way they treat you, I feel dread when I have to call any of the big companies. Transferred five times, on hold for 45 minutes, and suddenly I'm back at the starting point, forced to endure the whole recording urging me to use their website instead + the "speak your account number" system that never, ever understands me. I've been brought to tears by customer service — notably, AT&. […] Melting down accomplishes nothing. If you can connect with them, they might hook you up. Then when it's all over, three hours later, you can let out the tears."

2: "He didn't handle it admirably, but I have sympathy for the guy who lost his mind. It happened to me once when I tried to cancel my automatic payment with Sprint. After being disconnected at least 10 times, and being on the phone for 2 1/2 hours, I got a person who told me Sprint couldn't do that. I had to contact my bank to stop the payment. Something broke inside of me that day, my friends. I was actually crying with despair. […]"

(comments from Gawker.com)

Where did we go wrong? Why, with all the technological updates, customer experience blogs and experts, and mature call center staff,even overseas, are we still reducing our customers to quivering balls of tears?

It genuinely saddens me to read lines like “Something broke inside of me that day” and angers me to think that companies have the nerve to call experiences like the 2 above ‘service’ of any kind.

What are the issues identified by these comments?

1: It’s very clear that people HATE the IVR auto options, yet companies keep tinkering with them to make them “better”. My bank has a speech recognition system that asks me to speak my account number and PIN. Uh, bank? Has it ever occurred to you that I might not want to speak confidential information like that aloud?

We need to make the IVR better at recognizing speech, but we also need to offer a clear option for “human” in the *first* set of options, not after a Keystone- Kops- like chase through the phone tree from hell.

2: Lack of communication between platforms. The IVR doesn’t take notes. Department A doesn’t know what Department B does, nor do they care. Chat queues aren’t connected to voice queues, and can’t see any of the notes on the account from previous calls.

 This was one of the most common headaches I encountered in my call center production floor days. Nothing is more annoying to customers than having to repeat all the information they just gave “the robot lady”, and yet many companies still do not integrate their IVR and their CRM (or they don’t fix the issues with accounts that don’t “screen pop”).

3: Lack of awareness of common customer service requests. Stopping an auto pay should not take 2.5 hours and ten phone calls. Customers should not be “letting the tears out” after routine concerns like getting a new phone number, tracking down a missing bill, etc. Either major corporations are not aware of the top call drivers and don’t train to them, or they don’t care. Not sure which option is more chilling.

4: Understaffed and under trained call centers-. Yes, everyone is excited about the new social learning engine that will allow “the swarm” to collaborate on the customers’ issues. But that technology is still in its infancy and in the meantime, 3 hours-in-total calls, dropped calls, no supervisors, long holds….they’re clearly still an issue. We need more training, more supervisors, and more agents, plus better, more flexible staffing.

5: Lack of connection between the high level decision makers and the front liners. Just ONCE I would like to see the CTO or CFO of a megacorp take an irate phone call. Some of the corporate communiqués I’ve received are so out- of- touch as to be almost funny. “Customers will love our new Self Service option- it will save them time and money!” Yeah. Something like that. Only not at all.

 I’ve also worked with a company (that shall remain nameless) that insisted that all the product and service issues be dealt with by using “better scripting and delivery”. Hon, there’s no good way to explain charging 60 dollars a month for download speeds of 3.0 Mbps, with a cap of 200 MB okay? There just isn’t.

I think it’s clear that companies have a duty and a responsibility to step up to the plate and start getting serious about the quality of their call centers. I understand that customers sometimes don’t get it that if they want 30$ Internet, the cost cutting has got to start from somewhere, but I believe we can avoid the blatant “We don’t care about you” mistakes.

 

Let’s all step up our game.