The Customer Service Survey
VocaLabs' weblog providing news and commentary on the challenges of providing good customer service.
Bad Outsourcing Contributes to Fraud
Monday - October 27, 2008 02:22 PM in
by Peter Leppik
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.
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