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Re: Customer service by phone
Doc - I guess if you never deal with customers on the phone, it might seem like a good link. Actually, it's not. It's sour, and sarcastic, and totally unfair to companies who actually try to provide good customer service. Let me give you a little personal background: I'm a senior customer service rep on the phones for a consumer tech company. I've been a supervisor, and I've trained hundreds of reps. My impressions: 80% of customer service questions can be answered by reading the manual. Very few people bother. 90% of customer service and technical calls CAN be answered on the website. Most people don't want to spend 10 minutes searching. The company I work for has a very good searchable knowledge base on the website. In fact, all the level one customer service questions have answers and troubleshooting steps identical to what the customer can find on the website. And the majority of our customers are able to answer their own questions there. We have a voice response system. It directs people to the website, and through the basic triage of a call. Up to this point, the philosphy is that the faster the customer can answer their own question, the better off they are. Most people who have complaints about the voice response system are almost unintelligble on the phone, even to most humans. Of the calls that get through to a human, 90% of them can be solved within 3 minutes, if the customer follows directions. over 90% of them are from people who won't use the website, follow written instructions, or read the manual. Less than 5% of the calls get escalated to my level, which means I deal with irate customers, and people who actually have a question not answered on the web site. Of those, I'd estimate that 30% are genuine issues that our site hasn't addressed, or a level one agent couldn't handle. About 30% of the calls I get are because customers can't or won't follow written instructions. About 40% are people who want exceptions made to our policies, and that inevitably means they want something more than they've paid for or are entitled to. And about 10% are from people who just want to complain about something - anything - or need some human contact. So in reality, my experience is that about 1.5% of people who get through the voice recognition system actually have real issues that aren't addressed on the website or in the manual. It is the other 99% of the calls that get to a breathing human being that create long hold times. I am far more likely to spend 30 minutes on the phone with an irate customer who thinks we should compensate him or her $300 for having to sit on hold for 10 minutes, than to deal with a genuine issue. And that genuine issue has to wait for the irate egoist who needs "special compensation", is loudly profane at great length while threatening frivolous legal action. So it's not good - in fact, the post you refer to sucks. There are responses to this message:
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