I didn’t say they have to be fucking omnipotent. I just said if you MAKE MORE MONEY, you can HIRE MORE REPS. It’s really a very simple concept. If your customer base expands, your company ALSO needs to expand. If your restaurant had 10 thousand customers last year, and this year they have 20 thousand…guess what? You have to hire more waiters. Do you realize how silly it would sound for the restaurant owner to keep the same number of waiters, and say “Well I can’t hire any more because waiters are expensive”.
First of all, I don’t get angry; I just stop going to that store. But it depends: I don’t object to waiting in line, per se, but if they only have one checkstand open, and there are 15 people in line, I will ask them to open another checkstand. If they say there are no clerks available, I would suggest that they hire more clerks. If they refuse to hire enough clerks, then I will go to a store that DOES hire enough clerks.
Calm down there, Bucko - I never suggested anything of the sort.
That’s ALL I’m talking about. If the wait is reasonable, then we’re not talking about THAT company.
I think a couple minutes is reasonable, and lots of companies consistently do this quite commendably. 5 is a little much, although certainly still within the realm of reason. 20 minutes? Hire some more reps and quit whining about your profits. And with SOME companies, the call often doesn’t go through at all. That’s pretty sucky.
No, no, no. I didn’t mean “exactly” in the sense of a precise number. I meant in the sense that the companies need to take care of business by having enough reps so people don’t get put on hold for a half hour or hung up on. In other words, the right number of reps for the job, as opposed to being purposely understaffed in order to save money.
If it is so inefficient to have people waiting for my call because I have a problem or a question about a big ticket item I purchased, why do I get hit every 10 seconds by a salesperson trying to chat me up and let them hit me with their spiel on how happy I am going to be purchasing this can’t-live-without item?
But I do expect SOME kind of service from SOMEONE (or -THING). Columbia House and I are playing a little game in which I contact them in multiple media to tell them they sent the wrong item. Their part of the game is never to pick up their customer service line (30 minutes last I tried) or replying to my e-mail.
BTW, it may be toll free, but it still costs minutes on my cell phone!
Let me repeat this. I’m not talking about the business GIVING information, I’m only talking about verifying it:
Rep: May I have your credit card number please?
Customer: Certainly, that’s blah, blah, blah…
Rep: O.K., let me read that back to you; I have blah, blah blah…
I mean, for crying out loud, people; it’s done ALL THE TIME. It is most certainly NOT illegal.
The fast-food industry seems to have mastered it:
Customer: “I’d like two cheeseburgers and a coke”
Employee: “That’s two cheeseburgers and a coke. Please pull forward.”
NOT…
“Please repeat your order 2 more times so I’ll be sure I have it right”
Then why is it that LOTS of companies handle it quite well? For example, Hewlett Packard prides themselves on customer service, and yet still manage to stay in business. I bought a computer from them, and called them at 2:00 am with a question, and a live person answered the phone, and within 2 rings at that. Personally, I’d have been happy with much less. I called my Volkswagen dealer for service, and they put me on hold and then disconnected me, TWICE. Guess what kind of computer I will buy again? Guess which kind of car I will NOT buy again? And Kent4mmy wrote earlier: “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.” Heck, that would be excellent service in my book. Those of you arguing that having good service would prevent the company from competing are ignoring the fact that it is routinely done every day.
Looks like SPOOFE is pulling numbers out of his ass. (Or more precisely, doing multiplication of numbers that
Kent4mmy pulled out of his ass.
I said more reps, not ALL the reps. You pick an arbitrary number, and then claim that I am suggesting that companies have to hire that exact number. That’s called a strawman argument.
And I’ll ask THIS again. If it’s so financially impossible for a large company to have good customer service, why is it that MANY large companies seem to do it quite well? Maybe the ones who can’t seem to get their shit together need to fail math too.
Answering calls at 2:00 am is about as easy as it gets.
See, the thing that makes it hard to get through to agents is call VOLUME vs # of agents. I’ve worked in one of the HP call centers (the tech-support one): they had like 2 people staffed at 2:00 am. Tops.
See, at 2 AM, no-one calls. If no-one calls, it’s easy to answer the phone quickly. Back when I was doing tech-support for HP we averaged about 40 calls a week from 10:00 PM to 6:00 AM. Easiest job I ever had (other than staying awake).
Try calling 'em at noon eastern time on a Monday following a three-day weekend if you want to judge how good they are.
Intentional or not blowero, you’re coming across as one of those “I’ve never done it, but it’s obvious how to improve things” back-seat driver types. How many call-centers have you managed?
It’s so easy to fix things? Fine. Solve the following problem within the guidelines I provide.
I know that historically, we’ll have a jump of about 40-45% in call-volume for 3 to 4 weeks in January.
I’ve offered (and pestered) agents to commit to overtime. I’ve told my salaried employees that I expect some overtime from them. I’m putting my entire QA department on the phones for much of that month. We’ve got employees who’ve transferred to other departments who I’ve scheduled to come back and work in my department for some of the worst periods. I’ve trained about 12 other people who want some overtime, from other departments to take our calls.
The one thing I can’t do is hire outside the company. We cannot afford the 2-3 weeks of training, plus about a week learning curve* before they’re really moving at speed. No accounting department in the world would let me double my cost-per-call for temp employees (in other words, I can’t spend three weeks training them if I’m only going to use them for three weeks) and I can’t hire 'em permanantly. I don’t need them past February 1 at latest.
So, oh expounder of easy solutions, how do I resolve this? “LOTS of companies handle it quite well” is not an acceptible solution.** I want specifics. Simply yelling at CSRs and screaming"More calls, faster!" at them isn’t a solution either.
I eagerly await your solution.
Fenris
*The internal employees don’t count: they’re already familiar with the company policies, the phones, the computer software, background checks have been run, etc. Takes about a week to a week and a half of part-time training to get 'em up to speed.
**And frankly, they don’t. Like ALL call centers, they do what they can and live with the fact that sometimes their service levels will suck.
Mr. Blowero, YOU are the one picking arbitrary numbers. YOU are the one making unsubstantiated claims. You are claiming that companies are deliberately making customers wait. You have no proof for this assertion.
Clearly, you do not want to listen to evidence, and instead believe your opinion to be superior to the facts that other people offered.
However, in case you are willing to undilate your sphincter and extract your noggin, I’ll make it simple: What you are demanding is not feasible. Just because you’re an impatient fuck who wants everything to be done ten minutes ago does not mean that the real world needs to acquiesce to your silly, Ignorant delusions.
This should be inserted before the paragraph that starts “The one thing I can’t do…”
"Despite all my efforts, my number crunching shows that I’ve only managed to cover about a 25% increase. Unfortunately, as I stated, we’re going to have a 40% increase. That means really long hold times during busy hours and longer-than-normal hold times for non-busy hours. "
Speaking for the BigAss Bank I work for, we manage an average 85% service level company wide. That’s 85% percent of calls answered in 20 seconds or less. Considering we service over 30 million active accounts, that’s damn impressive, IMO.
Like Fenris said, management does whatever possible to staff enough people. Unfortunately, the turnover rate in call centers is high and it’s not a job you can start the first day. In my unit, reps go through six weeks of training before hitting the floor. (One week of bank regulations, one of learning fraud types/indicators, one of learning the systems and two weeks of taking calls in a controlled enviroment)
originally posted by Fenris
I get hourly emails about overtime. Even when I’m coming in an hour early.
Hard job. I am nice to CSR’s because I would not want the job myself.
That being said, certain companies do a vastly better job then others in regards to call centers. Some companies make it quite clear that they could give a rat’s ass about your call.
Fenris, I’m not sure what your point was about Hewlett-Packard. Are you saying they only have good service at 2:00 AM? Because I have called them at other times as well, and was pleased with the response no matter what time I called. You say it’s so easy to answer phones late at night, yet most companies don’t bother to do so. I think the point is that they are obviously TRYING to please the customers, rather than making excuses why they can’t. That goes a long way in my book.
Instead of just saying “well I’m more of an expert than you, nyah, nyah”, why don’t you explain why I’m wrong without resorting to fallacious arguments about non-existent legal issues.
I get the impression that you are pretty diligent at your job, Fenris, and I would think that whatever company you work for, the customer service is probably pretty good, is it not? If so, then we aren’t talking about you, so I wouldn’t take it personally. I’m talking about companies that just don’t seem to give a fuck, and they DO exist. If you’re putting that much effort into it, I would say that you DO give a fuck.
You keep switching arguments on me. First you were saying that it’s somehow NECESSARY to ask customers the same information over and over, but then you come back with a completely unrelated issue about overtime. When were we talking about overtime?
Second, our beef is about companies that ALWAYS have long hold times, or poor telephone interfaces, or where you can’t get through at all, but who put a permanent recording on their interface that says “we are experiencing unusual delays”. But you come back with an explanation of a TEMPORARY spike in volume in January.
Third, the argument was made that it’s impossible to hire enough CSR’s for large companies because it would cost too much. I made what I think was a pretty obvious point that MORE customers = MORE revenue = MORE staff. No exact numbers, just a general observation. And then you come back telling me about your SCHEDULING problems. I don’t see the connection. I get the impression that it’s a challenge, but you are managing to handle it. I just wish all companies could do so.
Well there you go! Doesn’t that prove my point, then? It is obviously NOT impossible to serve multi-million client bases effectively, because you ARE DOING IT. So why do I keep getting this crap about how I’m an idiot because I don’t realize the “impossibility” of serving that many customers? (Ahem…Kent4mmy & SPOOFE)
I certainly didn’t mean to imply that I think it’s easy to run a call center. But then, if you’re getting paid to serve your customers, then you should do it - easy or not. Honestly, I appreciate how difficult all of your jobs are, and I wouldn’t trade jobs with you in a million years.
This is sorta similar–but WTF is with the “Lower Fuel Prices In Effect” signs that are attached to rest stop exit signs on the New York Thruway? You know, the ones that have been there continuously for well over a year now?
