As promised, here’s a quote from a long letter I’m working on to business that encountered me as a cranky, unhappy customer.
Your phone tree, like that in many businesses, is a service nightmare. If I want technical support, it tells me to hang up and call another number. Then when I call that number, I get transferred back to the original number that can’t help me. If your system can transfer me from the second number to the first, why did I have to hang up and redial to get from the first to the second?
I will tell you that if I had tried to order the product by phone rather than the Web, I would have hung up and taken my business elsewhere. Your phone tree isn’t saving you money, it’s costing you sales.
When I finally reached an employee, he didn’t know the answer so he transferred me back into the phone tree. An employee should never transfer a customer into another phone tree. Customers need to be transferred to people who can answer questions.
The next employee I finally managed to talk with gave me a rushed, brusque answer. It was incorrect. More of my time wasted.
I’m convinced that American businesses flush more money down the toilet with bad phone practices than in any other way.
You say you want to build a relationship with customers. If that’s true, and not lip service, you need to be calling your own phone number every week. Better yet, get a relative to do it, or someone else who’s not too familiar with the systems you have set up.
Watch over her shoulder while she tries to figure out what button to push to answer her question. Listen to the frustration build in her voice as she just tries to reach a human being. And monitor the conversations she has to find out how your employees are treating people who call.
Stay tuned for next week’s installment, Your Customer Does Not Live in New York. I think you’ll like it even if you do, in fact, live in New York.
Hiya Sonia. Just caught this post in my reader and it reminded me of a guy who tried to cancel his AOL account and ended up in an epic battle of wits with an incredibly creepy customer service rep. I’m sure you’ve heard about this by now, but in case you haven’t, here’s the you tube link to his actual call. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JYIXzfhel8
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You are absolutely right. Frustrating phone trees. A friend was complaining the other day about one of the ones with voice recognition. she was looking for information on “employer health tax” (she’s a bookkeeper) and the system would hear “employer tax” and then say it didn’t recognize that choice.
My recent phone support nightmare is here.
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Oh man. Phone trees: the nightmare of customers everywhere.
I actually have more experience with the opposite side of it, as I’ve known many people who have worked in call centers, either making calls or taking service calls. Some companies outsource their customer support, so the people you’re talking to don’t actually work for that company. And if the call center they outsource to has poor hiring practices, well, you’re in deep trouble.
A friend of mine told me that when the tech support company he worked for changed ownership, hiring standards went from “people who are reasonably knowledgeable about technical stuff” to “people who have a pulse.” People who spent too long actually trying to help the customer got reprimanded.
On a good phone note, one phone tree I’ve never had a problem with, oddly enough, is my local Wal-Mart pharmacy. It never misunderstands what buttons I push, and I can refill a prescription in less than 3 minutes. Nice. 🙂
Sonia,
I actually think the part of this post that isn’t the letter would better inform them. It gives constructive, rather than just factual, criticism and helps them to put the problem in perspective.
I feel your pain though.
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Excellent! I always enjoy when people discuss this topic. I have worked in customer service, and took my job very seriously, which resulted in (usually) happy customers. And yes, you are reprimanded for talking to customers for to long, which is awful, because there are times when it takes longer to solve a problem. There is the hope, however, that if you know your product VERY WELL, you can answer most questions quickly, and it balances out.
Sadly, there is a lot of “people with a pulse” hiring in the area of customer service, which may as frustrating for the people who are serious about helping customers as it is for the customer themselves. After all, when a bad customer service rep answers a question wrong, or angers a customer, the customer will either call back, or ask for a supervisor, at which time they end up talking to someone like me, and by the time the customer gets to that level, they are angry–not to mention that they now have to explain the entire issue over again.
As far as phone trees are concerned, they are also a frustration for a caring customer service rep. At the job I had, there was phone tree to get to me, and in cases where the customer needed to speak to someone in another department, there was another phone tree–a GOOD customer service rep would NOT put someone into a phone tree, but rather, advise them that they were going to transfer them, advise that it might take a moment, then go through the phone tree WITH the customer (or have the customer on hold while they do it), rather than making them do it.
There are many, many common mistakes that customer service reps make that contribute to customer frustration and dis-satisfaction. I could, quite literally, write a book. In fact, as a career choice goes, training customer service reps is very high on the list of things I would be delighted to do for the rest of my life, if only to assure that no customer service reps ever use the words “our” and “policy” together in a sentence, ever again.
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I think this attitude should not be limited to phone, but any other area in which communication is essential, like email -if it’s automatic- or face to face customer care.
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