The Pending Call Center Revolution

I get emails from MindBullets: News from the Future every Thursday. They are fictional news items that pedict possible future trends. I really liked the one I recently got on “The New Call Center Revolution, dated June 12, 2007.” This article says that customers do not want to talk to machines anymore. So in this future time cell phone companies are offering the ability to automatically bypass the automated prompts to get to a real person. The moment you dial a call center the phone automatically generates the prompts to get to the real person. I can see a technology war starting here as the call center people try to head this off and the cell phone trying to combat their defences.

I am frequently frustrated talking to machines. At one company I otherwise like, their robot could not understand my pronounciation of their product. The robot eventually got frustrated and hung up on me. I also almost always have a question that does not fit into the options in their list of possible issues.

There are many companies that try to keep you from ever even reaching their call center. I recently went to the web site of a storage device company I could not find a telephone number on their site. If you search under telephone support you do not get a number. If you go to other options for contacting them, you can find that there is a telephone option but when you try to find the number you only get their policy for telephone support and no number. I managed to find a number only because it was listed next to the charge on my credit card bill. Thank you to the credit card company. I hope this practice is not changed. Once I got through the screening, their real person was actually helpful and did not insist on the service charge they try to collect for telephone support after three months. Score one for people. I have had call center people at other companies insist on a credit card before they answer the simplist question about their product, sometimes asking for almost as much as the product cost.

A large part of the problem comes from the trend toward out sourcing call centers, The usual arrangement is to pay the outsourcer for each call taken so the goal is to not have anyone call you which seems counter to normal customer relations. The automated voice response systems (a.k.a the robots) are designed to wear down the caller so they give up without actually telling them to go away. This is especially the case for technical support for products you have alreayd paid them for. I guess the short sighted vision is not geared for customer endearment to get more sales. It has been my expereince that most of the real people who work in the call centers (for support, not sales) actually do want to help you. They bear the burden of the customer fatigue or anger or frustration after the customer has beem "soften up" by the robots. I have done a lot of knowledge management work within call centers but it was always work designed to make the people provide better service, not to further outsource aspects of their job to robots.

Another future feature in the Mind Bullets article was the ability to detect and automatically redirect automated incoming sales calls to a number where a barrage of abuse is directed into the phone. Another tech war in the making.

Comments

[JR]

Ideally IVRs allow customers to self-help, but in reality people need to be involved for non-routine questions and issues. Without people involvement it would be difficult to provide true customer service.