The Customer Service Survey

Answer The Phone Properly or Not At All

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 12:11:57 -0600

Marketing guru Seth Godin recently had a bad experience with a KitchenAid teakettle leaving molten gobs of plastic on his thumb.

This was followed by an almost-as-bad experience trying to call KitchenAid to complain.

Godin's advice: "The only reason to answer the phone when a customer calls is to make the customer happy. If you're not doing this...do not answer the phone."

It sounds anthema to many in the call center business--who view busy signals and no-answers as the worst possible treatment for a caller--but Godin has a point. One thing worse than getting no answer is calling a company, spending ten minutes wading through menus then getting a "our call center is closed" message.

Usability Testing the Holiday Letter

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 13:41:54 -0600

This year my family decided to try something different for our annual holiday letter to friends and family: we're including a papercraft snowflake ornament which the recipient can cut out, tape together, and hang on the tree. Makes a great activity for the kids, and maybe hangs around a little longer than the usual newsy letter.

Since this is the first time we've tried this, I was a little worried that the ornament might be too hard to assemble, or that the directions would be unclear. So I did what any self-respecting dork would do: I enlisted relatives over Thanksgiving weekend to participate in a usability test of the holiday letter.

Obviously this wasn't as elaborate as a usability study for a multi-million dollar speech recognition application. I gave each participant (ten, including two of my kids) a pair of scissors, a roll of tape, a paperclip, and a copy of the ornament with the assembly instructions. Then I watched quietly to see how each person tried to put it together.

As a result of this usability test, I made two rounds of changes to the ornament design and instructions: the dotted "cut here" lines got bolder, some of the instructions were rewritten, the artwork was revised, and helpful illustrations were added.

I consider this a success. I found some things which surprised me, and the end design is much easier to figure out than the original version. This proves two things in my mind:

First, no project is too small for usability testing.

Second, I am a total geek.

"How Are You?"

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 09:37:14 -0600

Photo by maura
licensed under Creative Commons
I'm not sure when or why this happened, but somehow the question "How are you?" has become a surefire tipoff to telemarketing calls.

The script invariably starts like this:

ME: Hello?

CALLER: May I speak to Peter Leppik?

ME: This is.

CALLER: Hello, Mr. Leppik, how are you?

This seemingly-innocuous question is invariably followed by some sort of pitch which I have absolutely no interest in. Legitimate callers (defined as people I actually want to talk to) normally immediately identify themselves (and the company they're calling from) and unambiguously give the reason for the call. None of this scripted awkward friendliness, just right into "This is Bob from Shade Tree Mechanics, and your car is fixed as ready to pick up."

It wouldn't surprise me if this script oddity showed up occasionally, but I'm mystified as to why it seems to happen in every single telemarketing call I get.

It's as though every telemarketing script was written by the same guy, who decided at some point that it was necessary to ask "How are you?" to get past the awkward moment when the called party expects to hear the reason for the call, but the caller won't state the reason because then the called person would hang up.

So instead there's this awkward moment when the telemarketer asks me "How are you?" and I immediately know that I don't want to talk to this person, but I don't yet know why, so I'm forced to answer very tentatively, "Ooooookay."

And then the caller dives into the rest of the script while I hunt for a less-rude moment to hang up.

Price Discrimination and Politics

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 14:04:10 -0600

"Price Discrimination" refers to the common practice of offering wildly different prices for very similar products, in an effort to extract more revenue from those customers willing to pay more.

Perhaps the most familiar example is the byzantine system of airfares, where the price of any given seat on an airplane might vary by a factor of five or more, depending on when the ticket was purchased, what restrictions apply, and where else the traveler is going. The price of any given plane ticket is almost completely divorced from the cost of carrying a passenger from Point A to Point B, as evidenced by the fact that tickets on nonstop flights are usually more expensive than flights with one or more stops, even though the costs incurred on the nonstop flight are lower.

Most customers hate price discrimination (it's perceived as unfair, and often results in bizarre pricing rules), so companies which practice it often hide it. Amazon.com, for example, caught some heat a few years ago when some bloggers discovered that they offered the same book for different prices to different customers.

I thought it was amusing, however, to see price discrimination appear in political fundraising of all places. This week, the Obama campaign started raising post-election money to pay for things like campaign debts, inaugural parties, and so forth. They sent e-mails to campaign donors and volunteers offering a "victory" T-shirt in exchange for a donation.

As some people quickly discovered, though, at least two versions of the e-mails went out. People who hadn't given much money got an offer to "anyone who gives $30 or more gets a free T-shirt." Those who had given at least a couple hundred bucks got the message "give $100 or more and get a free T-shirt."

Amusingly, however, after some blogs started to write about this clumsy effort at price discrimination, the larger donors got a second e-mail with the more carefully-phrased solicitation, "If you give $30 or more you'll get a T-shirt. Won't you make a donation of $100 or more?"

A Historic Moment

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 14:00:15 -0600

Photo by Phoney Nickle
licensed under Creative Commons
I've made a conscious effort to keep politics out of this blog, even though (as readers of my personal blog know) I've been supporting Obama for President since late 2007.

Yesterday's election was, I believe, one of the few truly historic moments I will see in my lifetime, on par with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the 9/11 attacks. When Barack Obama was born, there were places in this country where he would have been treated as a distinctly second-class citizen, and where he could have exercised his right to vote only with considerable difficulty and personal risk.

Today he is our President-Elect.

As a result, millions of Americans can now honestly answer "Yes" when their children ask, "Is it true that anyone can become president?"

Just as important, Obama achieved his victory by appealing to the best in people, with a message of hope, inspiration, and competence at time of enormous national challenges. I don't think he will achieve everything his supporters hope he will, but just the simple fact of his election sends a powerful message of who we are as a country.

We are, in short, a country which has its faults but struggles to overcome them. We are a country which, in our most difficult hours, turns to humanity's highest ideals.

For me, the past few years have been difficult to watch, as I saw our elected representatives abandon many of the principles our country was founded on in a shortsighted and misguided effort to increase our security and preserve their own power.

I always believed, however, that this excursion was temporary. One of the most ingenious aspects of our system of government is the way it corrects excesses and abuses, even if that process is sometimes agonizingly slow. Obama will not fix all our problems, but his election is a repudiation of the way this country has been governed for the past several years.

I can think of no better way to sum up than this quote from Obama's speech last night:
And to all those who have wondered if America's beacon still burns as bright: Tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope.

Don't Vote the Issues

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 12:36:21 -0600

2004 Election Map by University of Michigan
licensed under Creative Commons
It's election day, and about time. Tomorrow we can all go back to work and stop obsessing about politics.

My mother used to be a state legislator (for twelve years), and what I learned about the legislative process from her has convinced me that most issue-oriented voters make their decisions the wrong way.

The usual process many voters and nearly all special-interest groups go through is to compile a checklist of issues, compare the candidates' positions on those issues, and choose the candidate whose issues best match the voter's (or interest group's).

Most elected officials, however, don't have the ability to make any sort of mark on more than one or two issues. It takes a lot of time, energy, and political effort to pass any substantive legislation, so in order to be effective anywhere, a legislator has to focus on just the issue most important to him or her.

Issues less important to a given politician won't get much attention; and some legislators may act against their position on a less-important issue in order to gain ground on something more important (this is called "compromise," and without it nothing happens in government).

So in terms of whether a given politician is going to have any effect on a given issue, it's more important to know what the one or two most important issues are for that politician than how he stands on a lengthy checklist of issues.

To put this in concrete terms, let's suppose that I care about three issues in this election: I oppose lemur control, I favor stop-sign reduction, and I favor kimchi import controls. I consider all these issues about equally important to me.

Bob and Jane are running for congress in my district. Bob opposes lemur control, favors stop-sign reduction, and opposes kimchi import controls; Bob's most important issue is kimchi import controls.

Jane, on the other hand, opposes lemur control, opposes stop-sign reduction, and opposes kimchi import controls; Jane's most important issue is lemur control.

Just counting the issues, I should vote for Bob since he agrees with me on two of the three issues. However, the one he disagrees with me about is also his most important issue and the one he's likely to actually spend time and attention working towards.

So in reality, I should vote for Jane even though she disagrees with me on two of the three issues, because the issue where we agree is also her most important issue and one she's likely to promote in congress.

When you decide who to vote for, don't look at the laundry list of issues--instead, focus on the one or two issues each candidate feels is most important. Once you've gotten past those couple of issues, matters of character, leadership style, partisanship, etc. are going to tell you a lot more about how that person will behave in office than the stated positions on all the minor issues.

An Open Letter to My Favorite Airline

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 12:24:26 -0500

Midwest Airlines has long been my favorite airline, thanks to the extra-comfy seats and hot cookies served on board. Lately they've been going downmarket, though, which has trimmed my enthusiasm for them somewhat.

I can't entirely blame them: running an airline is a tough business these days, and Midwest's options range from bleak to catastrophic. Nevertheless, I'm disappointed that they would choose to dilute what makes their brand unique and try to compete on price just like every other miserable airline out there.

I'm not the only one, as outlined in this letter which concludes "You have chunks in your beer."

You Can Find Anything on Google

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 12:56:18 -0500

Photo by Mike Wood Photography
licensed under Creative Commons
Searching for a topical theme for today's blog entry, I fell back on my usual technique: search Google for relevant terms, and find something which makes a good "hook."

After a few random search terms didn't pan out, I tried searching for "Halloween Customer Service," hoping I could find a cute story about call center agents dressed in costume, or a company which re-records its IVR prompts in a Count Dracula voice in October. Whatever.

The first item at the top of the list was Halloween Customer Service Jobs, from the MySpace Jobs board. Eight pages of job listings are available.

Whoa. I had never thought that Halloween even had customer service, much less that an entire job board might be devoted to filling positions therein.

It turns out that most of the listed positions are at party supply stores and the various transient costume stores which pop up all over the country this time of year.

It's a commentary on the super-connected ultra-globalized world we live in that you can type a somewhat nonsensical phrase like "Halloween Customer Service" into a search engine and come up with over a hundred job listings.

One final point: I started this blog entry remarking on my use of Google to try to find something to hook a blog entry onto, no matter how tangential. I think I succeeded.

Grains of Rice

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 13:48:55 -0500

Lately I've been using Flickr to find interesting or amusing photos for illustrating blog entries. Type a few words in the search box, click the "Creative Commons" box, and voila! Thousands of photos on topic, at least some of which are likely to be useful.

While I was browsing today, I stumbled on this photo, which doesn't fit with anything I was planning to write about in the next few days, but it's interesting enough I wanted to pass it along.

Bad Outsourcing Contributes to Fraud

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 14:22:46 -0500

Consumerist has a scary article today about how incompetent call center outsourcing contributed to consumer fraud. The problem happened when an outsourced security department mistakenly cleared a known fraudster to have access to a customer account.

Many people will undoubtably read this as an indictment of call center outsourcing, but I see it a little differently: the core issue is that the outsourcer was kept on such a short leash that they had to follow the manual even when common sense might dictate otherwise.

So when the fraudster called and was able to answer the handful of security questions (questions which remained the same from call to call), the security department gave him access to the account. This despite warnings that this caller was clearly not the account holder, and notes that the account should not be unfrozen for any reason whatsoever.

Snow!

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 11:52:38 -0500

Photo by Grant MacDonald
licensed under Creative Commons
The weather forecast for this coming Sunday has a new feature: snow.

One of the great things about living in Minnesota is the parade of seasons. You never get bored of the weather, since there's always something new. One of the not-so-great things, of course, is cold weather, shoveling driveways, and driving on slippery road.

You take the good with the bad. Kids have a different perspective: to them, it's all good.

My oldest was positively giddy at the prospect of the first snowfall of the season. I have to admit to a certain excitement, too: snow covers up all the stuff I didn't get around to doing in the garden, and it doesn't need to be mowed every week.

This snow (if it even arrives) is likely to be just a few flakes which melt as soon as they hit the ground--though I understand that in Nebraska they're getting ten inches.

I know this won't make me popular among a lot of Minnesotans, but I always hope for an extra-snowy winter. As I figure, if you're going to live in a place with winter, you might as well go whole hog.

Penguin Computing

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 13:55:27 -0500

Photo by mtip
licensed under Creative Commons
A recent server upgrade from Penguin Computing turned into the litany of customer service problems for us.

We had purchased from Penguin before, and were happy with the price and quality of the company's products. Penguin specializes in Linux server hardware, and there's a lot to be said for buying from a specialist like Penguin rather than a company which sells a little bit of everything like Dell or HP.

So when it came time to upgrade one of our servers, Penguin was on our list. The price and capabilities were right, so we placed the order back in mid-September.

The first problem came when Penguin tried to charge my credit card. I have both my home and work address as "authorized shipping addresses" on my card so I can order stuff online and have it shipped to work. Penguin's accounting system didn't care much for this arrangement, however, and interpreted the credit card company's "Charge Authorized" code as "Address Mismatch, Charge Refused."

When this happened, the person running the charge simply tried again. By the time they called me, my card had been approved for the same (expensive) server five times, completely consuming my available credit.

Once the credit card problem was squared away, we found out that a key component for our server was backordered with no shipment date in sight. When we realized that it would likely be months before our server shipped, I asked Penguin if they could offer a different model with similar specs for the same price. Penguin offered us a different model and knocked $700 off the price to match the price for the one we originally ordered.

The final goof-up came when the server was finally shipped (a month after we ordered it). Somehow Penguin attached our old address to the order (we moved about two years ago), and shipped our server to a vacant office. Fortunately FedEx caught the problem, so we received the order without any additional delay.

So will we order from Penguin again?

Probably--despite the problems, Penguin did right by us, sending us a more expensive server and eating the difference to get past the indeterminate backorder and service problems we experienced. We still like the price and quality of Penguin's products. The important thing, for me, is that the company stands behind what it sells, and they passed that test.

Not Always Right

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 14:09:59 -0500

Here's a blog I just discovered, even though it's been around for over a year: Not Always Right.

As in, The Customer Is Not Always Right. It collects amusing anecdotes from the trenches of customer service with an emphasis on clueless, noxious, and hostile customers. It seems to be updated several times a day most days, which makes it ideal for wasting time during those slow times at work.

How accurate are elections?

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 14:10:53 -0500

We're going into the home stretch of the 2008 election. I will be glad to have this over with: it's been almost two years since Obama ad McCain started campaigning, and with the financial crisis we've clearly reached a point where we need to choose a new leader in order to roll up our sleeves and get to working fixing our problems.

Elections are a process of choosing our leaders, and the current political philosophy is that the election should be as open and large as possible in order to reflect the will of the people as accurately as possible. This wasn't always the case: when this country was founded entire demographic groups were deliberately excluded from voting (women, slaves, etc.) on the theory that not everyone is "qualified" to help choose the President, congressman, mayor, or dogcatcher.

But how accurate are elections at reflecting the "will of the people"? I don't know the answer to that question (though maybe someone working for a political polling organization does), but it's obvious that elections suffer from several problems which can cause the outcome to differ from what it would be if you could poll everyone theoretically eligible to vote:

Self-selection: citizens choose whether or not to vote, and there's no attempt to correct for the relative opinions between those people more and less interested in voting. Demographic bias: many demographic factors strongly affect which candidate someone is likely to vote for (age, income, gender, race, and many others), and voting rates are dramatically different among different demographic votes. Order bias: on most ballots, candidates are listed in the same order on every ballot, rather than randomizing the order to correct for precendence and recency bias.
The irony is that political pollsters, in order to accurately predict the outcome of an election, have to correct their survey process in order to replicate the inherent biases of the election itself. In many ways it's easier to construct a survey which accurately reflects the opinions of the population as a whole than to figure out all the ways in which an election will differ from an across-the-board opinion survey.

First Experiment for Testing VUI Design Practices

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 14:17:30 -0500

Photo by practicalowl
licensed under Creative Commons
The first experiment of common VUI design practices will be to test the kinds of input callers prefer to use when calling an automated phone system.

This is being put together by a group at Nuance, the largest vendor of speech recognition software. We're going to evaluate a couple flavors of speech recognition, touch-tone, and mixed-mode input (where the caller can choose between speech and dialing digits).

Nuance obviously has a vested interest in making speech recognition look good, but we're designing the experiment with input from a number of industry professionals outside the company. The goal is to have the best possible experimental process, so the results (whatever they may show) will be convincing.

After Nuance has a chance to publish its own analysis we will be making much of the raw experimental data available to others in the industry so they can perform their own analysis.

So watch this space for more details as things progress. I'm hoping we'll have another experiment to announce in a few weeks, and some results in a few months.