And who the hell still has a rotary phone?
And is calling about a computer issue?
I always wanted to claim that I did- just to see what happens.
Do a bunch of CSR’s get on the line and mock you?
Y’know, when a customer tells you to “stick your errors up your ass”, you don’t actually have to do it.
Another former call center supervisor checking in. Fenris brings a good point and in some instances (medical under the new HIPAA guidelines or some financial services (my background)) it may actually be ILLEGAL to give out the info.
You have no idea how much time reps spend holding waiting for people to find the policy number or something similar. You may have all of your info but you wouldn’t be typical.
So did I, when I did it. And we called ourselves drones. So did our supervisor. So did I when I became a supervisor. Hell, so did the HR people.
My bank has a new wrinkle. They give the speech about how there is a higher than normal call volume but you don’t get put in a priority queue. Oh no!
The call is terminated and you have to freaking call back. I’m not happy.
Sorry Smeg!
You know how it is: it’s only ok to call a group a bad name if you’re a member of the group. Since you ARE, (and, of course, NOW I remember talking with you about it before…AFTER I’ve posted, of course :rolleyes: 
) I’ll just shut up right now.
Really.
For a second or two at least.
Maybe.
Fenris
What about the systems that place you on hold for ten, twenty minutes then a recorded message comes on the line and tells you that “We are experiencing unusually high call volume. Please call back later.” <Click> Hell, it’s a toll free number, and I have a speaker phone. If I don’t mind waiting, why should I have to call back and go through the same shit again?
Hrumph. An apology? In a Pit thread?
The boards aren’t what they were when I was a kid.
Arrr.
Ok
In that case, go fuck yourself you gawddamned phone-monkey drone.
Better?
Fenris
It wasn’t a rotary phone, but at my old work place, my phone wouldn’t register on some of those push-button menus. I’d push, hear the appropriate beeping, but my selections wouldn’t register, so I was glad for the “otherwise stay on the line and an operator/customer service agent will take your call” option.
The worst are those damn voice recognition systems. They NEVER work. All information should be entered using the keypad, or to a real person. Whoever came up with using voice recognition as a way to enter numerical data must have been smoking crack.
Just because you’re a big company doesn’t mean you can afford to do anything, particularly in today’s economy.
Think of phone queues this way: do you get angry when you go to the store and there is a line? Do you think that there should always be a clerk or cashier, at every store, everywhere, just waiting for you when you come in? Should every McDonalds open 6 drive-thrus instead of one, because you want to get to the front of the line faster? It’s not very practical. Companies that have phone queues but lower prices will make more money because people value lower prices more than instantaneous customer service.
There are some companies with unreasonably long waits, yes. I don’t think 5 minutes or so is that much to ask, really. I wait that long at the store and at least I don’t have to go anywhere or stand around in a physical line.
I’d like to know how to accomplish that. And how to get people to come in to work for the hour or two in the day where it’s just a teensy bit busier than the other hours of the day.
If the line is too long, yes. Reasonable waits are fine. It’s when the waits start creeping into 15 minutes or more that the company needs to do something.
You schedule them, the way all the restaurants I worked at in college scheduled more employees during Friday nights than Tuesday afternoons.
Call center thread…here I am
originally posted by NoClueBoy
The system that captures that information goes by the phone number you are calling from. If you call from a cell phone, or from work, or forgot to update your phone #, we have to ask. Trust me, with management breathing down our necks about handle time and service level (thanks Fenris), we are not going to ask for information we don’t need.
originally posted by Blowero*
As a bank representative, I am not allowed to do that by law until I verify I am speaking to the true cardmember. According to bank regulations, that is two pieces of information. Being in the fraud unit, I have to be 100% sure so I may, based on various factors, require more information. Like Fenris said, there are people who will call and claim to be the customer. Sometimes it’s legit (spouse, relative or assistant trying to help) and sometimes it’s fraud. It’s my job to find out.
Let me toss this one by you. If you didn’t have to wait for a rep but the fees were double, would that bother you? You’re calling a business. We are here to…guess what…make money. It’s the balloon analogy. Squish one area of an inflated balloon and another area swells. In cases of banks, the money saved on payroll (or operating costs) ensures rates/fees are kept low.
As for the many people who posted about the VRU/phone trees, again with the Fenris enough already, you . I get calls all the time that are not fraud issues. The customer spoke to us once and liked the service, so they call us back for issues we can’t handle. We have a service level to meet and IMO, I would rather talk to the people I need to and who I can help. It takes me under a minute tops to determine I need to transfer the call, but I could have lost the chance to help someone with a fraud issue.
I absolutely hate calling into the phone company, getting the automated system and the message that says they are experiencing heavy call volumes. That message will give the option of going online (already did that…that’s why I’m calling, because I have a question about what I saw online) or call back later. And it disconnects me. Grrr. I have the patience level of a sloth on herion. I will sit there and dial numbers and dial numbers and dial numbers until I get through. I will hang up and start dialling again within 5 seconds. I can spend hours doing that. And I have in the past and I will in the future. Because that’s just me.
I don’t have a rotary phone. But I like to pretend that I do.
“If you have a rotary phone, press one.”
Looks like Blowero never finished basic mathematics. How many companies can you name that can afford to lose $8.76 BILLION a year, in addition to their regular operating expenses?
I am happy to do as much as possible via the web. But, some companies, even big ones, have such crappy web interfaces that it is really frustrating. In fact, some are so buggy you enter all your information and click “Continue” and the damn page reloads again with all fields blank!
This sort of inefficiency is inexcusable when they are trying to pull customers to using the web.
That wasn’t my point. You said before that “the more times you’re asked, the more likely it’s been entered right and/or corrected if entered in error”. That sounds to me like you are advocating asking MORE than 2 times, like the more times you ask, the better. But EVERY time the customer gives the information, there is still a chance that it will be typed in wrong. To me, it makes more sense for the rep to read it back to the customer, because the customer KNOWS her name and address, and will immediately recognize a mistake. Typos are much less likely, because the rep is reading what he ALREADY typed, rather than RE-typing it and having a chance for further typos or simply mis-hearing the information. So no, it DOESN’T take an equal amount of time, because the way I suggested, you only have to verify it ONCE. And I didn’t just make this up off the top of my head; lots of businesses do it this way.
Well, I haven’t seen your research, but I find it hard to believe that if you read someone’s name and/or address to them, and it’s wrong, that they aren’t going to notice. And in my experience, the rep is just as likely (if not more likely) to do that “uh-huh” without listening thing you mentioned. Like the clerk at UPS who asked me to repeat my credit card expiration date 3 times and STILL entered it incorrectly.
That has nothing to do with it. You wouldn’t be giving out information, you would only be CONFIRMING the information just given to you. If it’s not the person in question on the line, then they wouldn’t have been able to give you the information in the first place. And if someone is listening in, they could just as easily get the information whether it’s the customer or the rep reciting it.
I’m sure you do, but now I’m wondering if common sense is sometimes getting lost in the process.