How Important Is Your Call?

For many, not very

Photo by Gian Pietro Dragoni on Unsplash

Thu, 04/13/2023 - 00:03

Does this sound familiar? “Welcome to [insert company name here], the [corporate slogan or superlative]. All of our agents are busy serving other customers. Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line for the next available agent. Your call will be answered in the order in which it was received. Your waiting time is approximately...”

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It would be kind-hearted to believe in the company’s sincere desire to serve, and reasonable to be kind to the person who eventually answers your call. Of course the company wants to address your concern; it wants and needs your business, right?

Well, that depends. Unless you are exceedingly kind, lucky, or just implacably cheerful, you’re probably not going to be happy with your “customer experience,” even if you’ve achieved the goals of your call.

The roster of annoyances is long and familiar. Regardless of all the corporate happy talk, we have good reasons to suspect that what many companies would really like is for us to go away.

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Comments

Submitted by jandell on Thu, 04/13/2023 - 10:22

I have worked with several call centers, and it's not exactly happy times for the poor folks (eventually) answering the phone. At one place, the agent was not given time to complete the important documentation of what transpired during the call - the next call rang the instant the prior call hung up. This in the interest of "productivity," disregarding the consequences of making phone reps try to serve the current call while documenting the prior call. It's real, and probably all to familiar - I remember Deming discussing the topic way back in the early 90s.

I, too, have worked with several call centers, and it almost always happens that some brainiac in the C-Suite decides that "IVR Penetration" is a useful productivity metric (IVR Penetration being the percentage of time in a service call that a customer spends interacting with the bot telling you what to push and when). I got to the point where when I had to try to help someone with that goal I would always suggest that they could immediately improve it to 100 percent just by getting rid of any option to connect to a human (usually pressing 0). They almost always thought about it for a minute...some caught on to the joke, and some seriously asked if it wouldn't negatively affect customer satisfaction...

(My own cable company has figured this out, though...the IVR proudly tells me that it has sent me a link to a texting chatbot that can help me, and then hangs up on me. IVR Penetration: 100%. Customer Satisfaction: 0. NPS: 0.)

In one of those projects, we did a study where we measured the number of disconnects over time. What we found was that over 95% of callers would hang up as soon as they heard an IVR answering the phone. 

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