Our dialer software needs to be manually reset to stop us from calling people at stupid times. We are calling small businesses, mostly, and the resetting is to be done by floor managers who are busy fighting other fires, and I’m sick of trying to reach people in the UK and NA Eastern time zone after 5PM, NA time zones between 11:45AM and 1:15PM, and the Pacific time zone before 9AM. I counted, and last Friday I reached 250 answering machines or people asking me to call later because so-and-so was at lunch, much of those because I was calling them when NEARLY EVERYBODY in that zone was not yet at work, out to lunch, serving people their lunch, or gone home after a long day’s work.
Then there are our screens, with fields that should be filled with useful information to help us do our jobs by targeting our customers’ specific needs, or at least not make us look like idiots. “Which of my domains are you calling about?” or “Which email will you send that to?” should NOT be answered with “I don’t know. The domain spaces contain your credit card data and your email address field just repeats your name.”
My wife, who hasn’t touched a computer for forty years except to play Solitaire and surf fossil invertebrate and horse rescue sites, has said, “I could still write better software in FORTRAN on punch cards,” and it’s true because you couldn’t pass a 100-level programming class writing code this shitty. Does nobody test this crap at all before releasing it? The fucking time zone is built into the record!
Then there is the dialing “predictor” that is fond of connecting your next call before you have finished your last, so when you ask to speak to Joe he angrily says, “I already said that I am Joe.” These people are our customers and I want them to, at very least, STILL be our customers at the end of the call and we don’t make, or keep, any friends by pissing them off or making them think we are stupid. I mean, I regularly have people hang up on me before I even knew the call had connected, and it takes until the second ring for the Caller ID to register, and longer yet for them to figure out they don’t want to talk to me. Then there were the months that our number came up as just a string of zeroes. Shit, I wouldn’t answer that call. I’m surprised how many customers did.
My company is one of the largest and oldest of its kind and this amateurish coding is inexcusable. And then there are the calls to people who say, “But we closed that account years ago,” but management is trying to crack down on that. Kaizen, I suppose.
