The Customer Service Survey
VocaLabs' weblog providing news and commentary on the challenges of providing good customer service.
The New Reality
Wednesday - November 23, 2005 11:47 AM in
We've written about the IVR Cheat Sheet to Find a Human before, but it's worth mentioning again, if for no other reason than that National Public Radio had a story about it during this morning's commute. NPR reported that their staffers were able to get to a human in under a minute on average with the 15 numbers they tried. The link to the site is prominently displayed on NPR's website, and the story is listed under their "most emailed stories."
In this day and age, news travels fast. Traditional media are as much news amplifiers as news sources. And whether it's customer service hints or photos of cats in compromising positions, people are getting better at ad-hoc collaboration. This is actually part of a bigger story about people learning to take advantage of the Internet. If we ignore the dot-com sideshow, there's been a steady progression in my lifetime from my 7th grade buddy downloading thousands of knock-knock jokes off of Usenet (1985) to my first web page (1993) to today's blogs and wikis.
People use the Internet to collaborate. They take ideas and improve on them. One thing they improve is making it easier to collaborate. That means that more people collaborate more often, in bigger or smaller ways. Which makes it easier to collaborate. And so on. This isn't a "Web 2.0" thing or the next big stock bubble. It's a steady progression. It happens with or without big investors. And it's nowhere near done.
Whether it's to find missing loved ones in an emergency or to post pictures of pets, people are collaborating quicker than ever. For customer service, the IVR Cheat Sheet is just an opening salvo. These days the support rep isn't the only one sitting at a computer with access to a vast database of customer incidents: the customer on the other end of the phone is often just as well armed and networked. Companies which adapt to this reality will thrive, the rest will wonder where their customers went.
Posted by David Leppik
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