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Get Out of Voice Menu Pergatory
renx99 writes "I don't know about you, but I hate calling tech support, and the worst if the wait. Paul English felt the same way and has put together a list of shortcuts on how to get to a human quickly. If enough people bypass these phone systems, maybe the big companies will finally get a clue and start providing real customer service again..."
I think I read somewhere that on some voice menu systems, a swear word will get you connected to a human. I definitely tried it once, and it did indeed work.
I have some issues with my broadband provider from time to time and have to call tech support. The automated message has me enter in my account number before having me directed to the correct operator. At that point the guy (or girl) at the other end asks me for my account number. It drives me nuts. I have found a few short cuts to get to an operator now and use them, but for a while I was entering in random numbers and it seemed to have no effect. Why implement such a system?
This works best when customers clearly identify themselves to the IVR on the way in. It changes dynamically however when a customer simply "pounds zero" or makes other attempts to avoid the recognition system, by making them the lowest possible priority, lengthening their overall wait time.
I recently had to use SBC's automatic phone menu system and was very pleasantly surprised. The voice recognition has gotten pretty good - it had no problem with my accent. I managed to pay my bill over the phone quickly and efficiently without ever talking to a real person. I really didn't need to, and I am sure it would have been slower if I did.
So, such systems aren't universally bad. The only thing they need is the option to talk to a live person and any given point in the menu. That would make the customers feel secure and calm - sufficiently so that they don't necessarily use it always.
One of the biggest lies of this century has to be:
Your call is important to us.....
If that really were so companies wouldn't have fired 2/3rds of their staff and got a flippin' computer.
Keep track of the ones that screen your call into areas away from their profit centers. If you get no luck with their customer service dont be afraid to call their sales desk etc... You're still talking to people responsible to the company word of honour and if you bug them enough they may actually help.
If your call is really important to them they will appreciate the extra efforts you go through to bring it to their attention.
good luck
I don't understand why all customer support systems don't employ some sort of call back mechanism. You have employees sitting at their desks, waiting for calls to come in, but inevitably there are more calls in the queue than employees so the customer is the one doing all the waiting. Why not do it the opposite way? Customer calls tech support, goes through a few basic questions to direct them to the right department if neccessary, then they enter their phone number and hang up. Their phone number goes into the queue and the CSR operator, instead of answering the next incoming call, calls the next customer in the queue! Customer doesn't have to be tied to the phone listening to musak, company doesn't have tens/hundreds of callers on hold at any given time putting load on their phone lines etc., CSR doesn't have his phone ringing off the hook -- they call you when they are ready to handle the next call. It's so simple, why isn't this more common?
its ok. they dont want to take your calls either.
"Das, who quit the job after four months, said she learned to dislike Americans. "Rarely, there are people who are good," she said by e-mail, "but then others remind me that all they believe in is cursing, and they don't have respect for others.""
two sides to every coin my friend
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
- Or, big companies will get rid of customer service. Would that be any better?
They can't get rid of customer service completely, but you know they all want to. They can, however, make it as hard as possible for you to contact them. Have you tried to find the customer support number on the website of a big company lately? If you have and you found it, I congratulate you. A couple of years ago I would have killed to have the list in TFA just for the 1-800 numbers it contains. I've spent days tracking down some of those phone numbers when I needed them.
They're getting so rare nowadays that I'd be surprised if it's not a scavenger hunt item by now.
Just because you've through to a human doesn't mean that you're through waiting.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I had a hilarious experience calling an insurance company in Canada once. They had one of those voice recognition systems, and I spent at least 15 minutes searching through every menu, trying to find what I wanted, or even a choice to speak to a representative. Some menus I couldn't back out of, and I had to hang up twice to return to the main menu.
:)
The third time I finally got too frustrated and started swearing as soon as the computer answered. The voice paused for a few seconds, then said "Ok, a representative, one moment please."
I thought it was a brilliant idea. Recognize when the customer is getting pissed off and then get him to a human ASAP.
Yeah, I agree with this. While I'm not necessarily a fan of the whole third-world-outsourcing phenomenon in general, just because you get someone in a call center in Calcutta or Bangalore doesn't mean that the service is going to be any worse than it would if you got someone in America. And based on my experience, their English is often better, and they're loads more polite.
My latest experience was with Comcast, which does have a U.S.-based call center, and I found the reps to be obnoxious, rude, and prone to lie through their teeth. They seem to be trained to tell you anything, no matter how ridiculous, just to get you off of the phone. And the clincher is that sometimes when you call back, another rep will reveal some of the "notes" that previous reps make in your file, which in my case made it quite plain that the procedure that I had been told to go through was complete BS and that they never had any intention of solving my problem. And when I asked to speak to a manager, they hung up on me.
Now I'm not saying that there aren't obnoxious, rude, lying creeps in foreign-outsourced call centers as well (or that there aren't intelligent, helpful, easily understood people here in the States), but to date I've never run into any in my calls to India that were half as bad as some of the lowlifes that seem to be filling the desks at some U.S. based ones.
However this might not be a totally fair comparison, since most of the U.S. callcenters I've experienced were billing or pure "customer service," while the outsourced ones were mostly technical.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
If enough people bypass these phone systems, maybe the big companies will finally get a clue and start providing real customer service again.
Even small companies like mine are feeling the pinch from the phone. At times the phone literally rings 20 times an hour. Employing a receptionist to answer the phone would mean increasing prices on everything. Customers are cheap?
The answer?
Do what the big companies do. We implemented asterisk and it takes at least 2 or 3 minutes wait through automated messages before you can get to a live human. Our call volume dropped about 90%. We could afford to have humans answer the phone again, when it rang. Our sales neither increased nor decreased, so the net effect was positive. Most calls before the system was implemented were mostly junk calls -- customers asking us to tell them things that were definitely in the manual. In fact, we photocopied and put beside the phone manuals to all the products we sell, and would require customers read through the manual with us for their answer before we implemented the PBX.
I'm certain many of these companies could afford a human answering the phone if you were willing to pay for it. Are you? I have my doubts.
Good customer support does exist, you just need to look a bit harder. Ironically, the reason I picked this company was purely cost - if they can undercut their competition and still provide that good customer service then they must be doing something right.
At the other end of the spectrum is Orange. I recently tried to upgrade my mobile and contract with them (my old one had reached the end of its term), and found that they wouldn't allow me to do so - the offer was open to new customers, but people who were existing customers weren't eligible. They suggested that I switch to a pre-pay (no contract) plan, and then I would be eligible. I suggested that they had two alternatives - they could either give me the same terms as a new customer (and make a smaller profit than if they charged me what they wanted to), or I could go next door to their competitor and get a similar deal from them (in which case they make nothing). They called my bluff, and discovered that I was serious. I now have a shiny new Series 60 'phone, a new contract (for half the price of my old one) with twice as much talk time and ten times as much data.
The key to getting good customer service is for enough people to be willing to walk away from a company that is not providing it.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I can rearrange the menu choices and change the message on an auto-attendant on our phone system in like 5 minutes. If shortcuts through our system become common knowlege, I can break the shortcut. I can also do a log analysis and check that site to do a timing attack to correlate a number with whomever's got the site and block them. Our system runs perl, so I can automate this. And I can use ANI so CallerID spoofing is mitigated.
I know that a high percentage of the /. crowd has worked support. You try to provide the best support you can given your budget. If a customer talks to rep A for 15 minutes and then has to transfer them to rep B who then has to escelate them to another person... you haven't solved that person's problem, you've wasted an hour of their time and you've paid for a manhour which has not provided the quality of support you are trying to accomplish.
So using an automated system to try to expedite matching the right support worker with customer's needs is a good thing. It's not enjoyable by any means but it allows you to hire more and better people to serve your customers.
Of course there's going to be a threshold regarding how many hoops a person should have to deal with before they get the support they need. That's part of the job of setting that system up. A person should get the rep they need to talk to as soon as possible. You should be monitoring the performance of your system to see where the bottlenecks are, where people are getting stuck and where people are giving up and fix those problems.
But you only have so many hours of your time in the budget. Every hour I spend re-jiggering the system because somebody is telling people how to bypass is an hour I otherwise could have spent making the system better for the customers.
A DSL ISP I used to work for would ask customers to enter their DSL phone number, and that was the first thing we'd ask for when answering the phone as well. Why? Because more often than not, the software to automatically pop up their account info didn't work. Why? Because the company spent bajillions of dollars contracting somebody the CEO played golf with (or something) to build the software, and it would have cost bajillions more to get them to fix it.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Why would companies abandon phone trees? They save the companies so much money by reducing the number of people they have to hire to answer phones (of course, this is also why rural or overseas call centers are popular). If customers get fed up and just go online (which is the first thing companies like SBC urge you to do when you connect) or give up seeking support altogether, they save even more money. It's only if significant numbers of people get fed up and stop buying their products that they would have to change. Now, government agencies (at least the ones that let us call them) never have enough money, so they'd probably always have phone trees.
Oh, and the US seems to be one of the few countries in the world where 24/7 phone lines (or 6am-10pm, or something similar) seem to be what customers expect (vs 9-5 Monday-Friday). I'm sure US companies would love to reduce the number of hours. If we consumers only expected service during those hours, then maybe they could use the savings to hire more employees to answer the phones. Or, they may give us just as bad service, less often.