The Customer Service Survey
VocaLabs' weblog providing news and commentary on the challenges of providing good customer service.
World's Worst Call Center Technology
Wednesday - December 14, 2005 04:24 PM in
Some customers are angry.
Angry customers are bad for business.
So it makes sense to identify the angry customers and try to give them an extra dollop of attention.
Angry customers are bad for business.
So it makes sense to identify the angry customers and try to give them an extra dollop of attention.
Which makes the idea of using technology to fast-track upset customers to priority service attractive. For example, by using voice-stress analysis, or spotting profanities in a speech recognition system.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
This idea pops up every couple of years (for example, here's an article from about 18 months ago which posits shunting angry customers straight to a supervisor). It sounds nice in theory, but it ignores Leppik's First Law of Customer Service Automation:People are smarter than computers.
As soon as customers start discovering that getting angry and swearing at the machine will get them a hot-line to the best qualified agents, they'll start unloading profanities like drunken sailors as soon as they decide they need live help:
"Thank you for calling ACME Wid..."
"^&$&^ *&%^^&% &^$#%$##@#@!"
"One moment while I transfer you to a customer service supervisor."
The problem is that this rewards the caller for his anger. If getting angry gets you super-premium service, why do anything else?
Instead, you want to reward the caller for following the rules. Remember that the hardest part customer service automation is figuring out what the caller wants to do. So the quickest way to get service should be to cooperate with the IVR in figuring out how to handle the call (remember that most callers know before they pick up the phone if they need to talk to an agent or not). And the more information the caller is willing to give the IVR, the higher the caller should go in the queue for live help if that's what's needed.
That way, customers learn that to get the best service, they need to work with the system, rather than trying to bypass it.
Posted by Peter Leppik
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
This idea pops up every couple of years (for example, here's an article from about 18 months ago which posits shunting angry customers straight to a supervisor). It sounds nice in theory, but it ignores Leppik's First Law of Customer Service Automation:People are smarter than computers.
As soon as customers start discovering that getting angry and swearing at the machine will get them a hot-line to the best qualified agents, they'll start unloading profanities like drunken sailors as soon as they decide they need live help:
"Thank you for calling ACME Wid..."
"^&$&^ *&%^^&% &^$#%$##@#@!"
"One moment while I transfer you to a customer service supervisor."
The problem is that this rewards the caller for his anger. If getting angry gets you super-premium service, why do anything else?
Instead, you want to reward the caller for following the rules. Remember that the hardest part customer service automation is figuring out what the caller wants to do. So the quickest way to get service should be to cooperate with the IVR in figuring out how to handle the call (remember that most callers know before they pick up the phone if they need to talk to an agent or not). And the more information the caller is willing to give the IVR, the higher the caller should go in the queue for live help if that's what's needed.
That way, customers learn that to get the best service, they need to work with the system, rather than trying to bypass it.
Posted by Peter Leppik
Posted at 04:24 PM by | | | |