The Insincerity of Call Centers
O’ Cry Me a River of Crocodile Tears
“Your call is important to us"
When an expression is overused, it no longer has any meaning. How many times have people told you to “Have a nice day”, “How is it going?” or “Let's get together soon”. And don't we all know someone who tells everyone they meet and every one of their pets: “I love you”? These sorts of statements aren't sincere, deep or genuine. No, these are throwaway comments that lack any real substance.
Truth be told, if my call was important, then someone would give a damn about the problem I'm facing, the terrible service I’m getting on this call, the lack of interest the company has about learning about problems with their product or service, etc.. But the reality is that my call isn't important - it’s actually a cost of doing business for a company and they'd rather not hear from me at all. In fact, the only person who cares about getting my call is an outsourced call center firm that gets paid by the number of calls they process.
Words are cheap while action takes effort and money. If you operate a call center, please don't tell me my call is important unless you stand prepared to defend that statement. Tell me “Your call is not only important in our company, it has saved over $727 million in suggestions we've gotten from view our customers”. Or, tell me “Your call is important to us because we need to avoid additional lawsuits so please help us find our product shortcomings”. Or, how about saying that callers like me are important because “Collectively callers have identified over 600 new product innovations that have been added to our solutions”.
The next time someone tells me my call is important to them you can expect me to launch into a tirade asking them to quantify for me how important it really is. I'm not going to move from this point until they can prove to me they actually care about the call, will use information generated from this call, and, can show me some correlation between the call and future business results.
“I understand”
This technique really gets under my skin. Call-center workers are being coached to game their compensation systems. They know their call center uses word-spotting technology to evaluate the performance of their employees. As a result, call-center workers play you and trick you into saying expressions such as “that's great”, “I understand” or “Yes, that is correct”.
Gaming the callers is so wrong, wrong, wrong!!! In the perverse logic that only call centers can come up with, telephone operators have made serving the customer secondary or tertiary to playing games with them for their own economic benefits.
If you feel like you're being gamed then hit the gamers right where it hurts: in their pocket book. We you feel they are prompting you, keep saying “repeat that” or “I don’t understand” as it indicates to their employer that they are being ineffective as a call center worker. The more times you say “repeat that” the worse their overall performance rating is going to be.
What really p*****s me off is the insincere call center worker telling me that they understand me when I can’t understand much of anything they’re saying because of a terrible telephone connection or language difficulties. I know your compensation or continued employment is tied to the degree with which we communicate. But, the moment I detect you’re gaming me, I’ll either game back or escalate the call.
“I am the Supervisor”
Right, and I’m the reincarnation of Charlemagne. When you’re not getting anywhere with a call center drone and you ask to speak to a supervisor, they always respond with:
· “No one is here right now” – Oh, come on now, how many businesses leave people working without any supervision? Someone is responsible but this worker doesn’t want you to bother them and get the drone in trouble.
· ‘They’ll tell you the same thing I have told you” – True, if the call center is an outsourcer and everyone works from the same, narrow, outdated and inflexible script.
When I smell outsourced call center, I start looking up the corporate phone information on the web. I know I’m not going to get anywhere with these third party people in Turkey who can’t even buy the product I own as it isn’t sold in their part of the world. If my issue could be solved via a script, then put it on the web as a FAQ.
I’m going to bypass call center supervisors and go to the CEO or Chairman of the company. There’s no point in dealing with third parties and their hierarchy since they aren’t empowered to do anything anyway. Their job is to deny everything, admit nothing, promise nothing and send you packing without delivering anything.
Technology
Can CRM technology make the call center experience better? Only marginally so. It's the users and operators of call centers that can the experience better. Sadly, insincerity still rules and disappoint is the norm.
