What unadulterated bullshit. Every automated phone menu for a major corporation is “experiencing unusual delays” every damn time I call. Obviously they’re not that farking unusual. 100 duckets and a roast goose to the man that brings me Ted Turner’s head.
This drives me fucking insane, too. “We are experiencing higher than normal call volume”… obviously it’s normal enough for you to have had the fucking message made! Why do I hear it EVERY FUCKING TIME I CALL!?
Or how about this: you spend about 7.2 minutes entering data through their system with your touch tone phone pad. The computer says a rep will be with you in a year or so of waiting. When you actually do talk to the "human, " THEY ASK FOR THE SAME INFO YOU JUST TYPED IN!!!
I hate that.
I swear its busywork to distract you from trying to talk with them. They are hoping you will give up in frustration.
“Using your touchtone phone, please enter your 32 digit customer code, which you probably don’t have, and wouldn’t know where to find it”
Or
"Using your touchtone phone, please play ‘Jingle Bells’ "
Well, yeah! The idea is that you will hang up in disgust before requiring any potentially expensive service. “Keep your broken widget, pay your inflated bill, stare at the bluescreen of death… just don’t bother us!” Rare is the company that honestly realizes that satisfied customers can provide longer term benefits.
I was on the phone with AOL for forty minutes the other day, and gave all my information including the last four digits of my Social Security Number to every single person I spoke to. Then this bitch gets on the phone and informs me that, despite the fact that I have now recited the address, phone number, SSN and billing information of the AOL account concerned, she can’t give me any of the information that I need because my AOL account is not registered to my name. We played Guess That Name for another fifteen minutes before I realized she wanted my NICKNAME and not my full first name.
Future note for all AOL employees: if the person you’re speaking to has a name that CONTAINS THE NAME THE ACCOUNT IS REGISTERED UNDER, chances are, it’s probably the same person. Don’t cop an attitude about it.
Lately, just about every corporate phone message I hear includes, “please listen carefully as our options have changed”. I’m guessing that once one company thought up this jusification for saying “please listen carefully” everyone else copied it.
LOL, my one of my creditcard companies call system has been saying that for the last year.
If my call really was that important to them, they’d hire enough people to answer the phones.
what I do, is, as soon as I realize I’m being sent into Phone Tree Hell, I just start hitting ‘0’ to every prompt they give me. At least 3/4 of the time this connects me with someone directly, and usually fairly quickly. (The other 1/4 of the time it’ll get me some kind of error message so I have to hang up & call back - but, playing those odds, it’s still worth the effort.)
Once in a while this will get me connected to an operator/admin who will huffily tell me I’ve entered the wrong code/ reached the wrong support person - in which case my response is, “…Oh, this isn’t Customer Service? <syrupy-sweetly> Gee I’m sorry, your phone tree is SO confusing, I must’ve hit the wrong code by mistake! …Can you please transfer me? Thanks!!!” - and they usually do.
YMMV, of course -
A local apartment complex has a big outside banner proclaiming “RARE VACANCY”. If it’s so rare, dipshits, why do you have a non-destructible banner that is always up?
Your frustration is understandable. However, the ratio between customers and service representatives is very, very…wide. Especially when you’re dealing with a large corporation.
Do not make the mistake of thinking that these toll free customer service numbers are designed to intentionally frustrate you so you will hang up and thus no one in the call center has to deal with you. That is ridiculous.
I take it no one with your type of opinion has ever actually worked in a call center. If you did, you would no longer expect to have a service rep or helpdesk agent sitting by his/her phone just waiting for YOU to call in.
If you think that you are frustrated, just try fielding the THOUSANDS of calls a day that these reps are dealing with…and knowing that most of those calls are coming from people who now have an attitude because they were made to wait too long.
If you are placed on hold, it is only because EVERY agent is ALREADY on the phone with another customer. This is really true…I ought to know.
By the way, the success of the call center, as well as your own, is based on customer satisfaction, how many calls you field, how little time a customer is left on hold etc. All of these stats are recorded for every agent on every shift by the ACD, or similar, telephony system being used. When you see 25-30 calls piling up in the queue, you start to sweat it because, the longer they (you) wait, the less likely there will be anything more than a 3% increase in your annual performance appraisal.
NutWrench writes that if his call were important enough to the company, they would hire enough people to answer all the calls.
Does anyone except me realize how idiotic that sounds? Dell Corp has, what, MILLIONS of customers? IBM? AOL? AT&T?. MILLIONS of customers. I suppose these companies should put at least a quarter of that number on the payroll as service reps. At $12.00 an hour, they would be expending 3 million an hour in salaries. That’s about 24 million a day to talk to frustrated assholes with attitudes.
Yeah, that’s really gonna happen.
Well, yeah, they try to squeeze as much work as possible out of their drones by measuring hold times and such, but at the same time, it’s bad business to have enough reps to handle all the calls immediately, because if you don’t have customers on hold, that means you’re paying reps to sit around with nothing to do.
A) What ** Kent4mmy** said, mostly.
B) The reason for the IVR (the call menu thing on the phone) is primarily to screen out people who the CSRs can’t help. For example, in one of the call centers I’m in charge of, we only cover customers who purchased an extended warranty in certain states. If you purchased your warranty in another state, you’re not our customer, you’re not in our database, we don’t have any information to give you, so we try to screen you out before you take up valuable CSR time. Same with the tech-support department: we don’t give ANY software support, and certainly not 3d party software tutorial support. We’ve programmed the IVR to do our best to keep you away from a human being: we’d rather our CSRs talk to our customers.
C) The IVR asks for your information to try to screen you out. The CSRs repeatedly ask for your information because the single, number-one, most annoying problem a customer can have is that a check, or documentation, or a serviceperson or a replacement part is sent to the wrong address. The reason you’re asked more than once is redundancy. I just analized our most common errors in one of my centers and of all CSR related errors, 40-some percent were not getting the right address/name/phone number. The more times you’re asked, the more likely it’s been entered right and/or corrected if entered in error. I know it frustrates some people but not nearly as much as taking a day off from work waiting for a serviceperson to arrive, only to find that the serviceperson went to 123 Oak WAY instead of 123 Oak STREET.
Fenris
A) They’re not “drones”. Frankly they’ve got a damned hard job and most of the people I work with do it creatively and well.
B) It’s a balancing act. There’s a measurement called a “Service Level” which is “Number of calls answered in a certain amount of time” (In two of my centers, a service level of 100% is achieved by answering 80% of the calls within 20 seconds (IVR time doesn’t count). We’re contracted to have a service level of 85% and we try to hit it exactly: higher than that, we’ve got CSR’s sitting around waiting for the phone to ring. Lower than that, we’re providing customer service below what our client has contracted for. This is why a huge chunk of my life is spent analyzing call volume, watching queues, changing schedules, etc.
FEnris
Uh, if you have MILLIONS of customers, it stands to reason that you are making MILLIONS of dollars, and should be able to hire more customer service reps.
They should hire EXACTLY the number of customer service reps it takes to not have unreasonably long hold times - no more, no less. You’re telling us the companies put profit above satisfied customers, and we’re supposed to by sympathetic? Fuck that. Besides, the point is - don’t call it “unusual” if it’s not.
There’s a much more efficient way of verifiying the information. The rep can read it back to the customer. If it’s wrong, the customer immediately corrects the rep. This only needs to be done once. No offense, but the way your company does it is pretty silly. I mean, I’m really not getting the logic here: The whole problem is high call-volume, and you want to get through MORE calls by keeping customers on the line LONGER asking them the same questions over and over?
When I was a “drone”, we called them SLA’s (Service Level Agreements). The sales folks would go out and present/pitch different SLA’s costing different $$. Most companies were happy with an 85% answer on the first ring (after the screen-out process), and a 90% on-hold time no less that 1 minute.
We were trained to understand that these SLA’s were serious business, and that in almost all cases, the call stats determined whether or not the SLA was renewed.
Basically, the attitude was “do the best you can so we don’t lose this million dollar support contract.”
The company I worked for also took training very seriously.
You are objectively wrong. It is NOT more effecient. We’ve actually done studies on this.
#1) It takes about an equal amount of time for the CSR to say “Could you verfify your address and phone number for me” and have the customer recite it vs “Here’s the address and number we have (reads it) can you confirm it?”
#2) When the CSR reads it off, it’s far more likely that the customer will say “Uh-huh” without listening, thus causing more errors down the road.
#3) There really is a security issue here: we don’t give out other people’s addresses. EVER. We don’t know it’s you on the other end of that phone line. Do you really want us to give your current address and phone number to your psycho ex-girlfriend who you are trying to avoid 'cause she’s trying to stalk you? We’ve actually had that happen a few times. (Where the psycho is obviously trying to get the CSR to read THEM the address).
We do think about, research and analyze these things. Honest.
Fenris
I have no beef with the people on the other end of the phone. Its the phone system that annoys me.
Some systems tell you estimated wait time, I can deal with that. Just don’t blow smoke up my ass about “unusual delays” or “higher than normal call volume.” If it’s gonna be 15 minutes just tell me.
And, don’t break into the elevator music every five minutes to tell me “my call is important.” Frankly, I could give a shit what you think of my call, just let me know how much longer its going to be before I can get someone to replace the defective crap you sold me.
**
IVR systems that do that are A) New and B) Expensive.
I think they’re worth the expense though (not that I have any control over it: those decisions are made MUCH higher up the ladder than I am). I agree that they’re lots less frustrating.
**
This drives me nuts too! I hate that.
Fenirs