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PC Call Centers Garner Lowest Satisfaction Score
Lucas123 writes "The University of Michigan took its first American Customer Satisfaction survey and found that of six industries measured for the Customers' Call Center Satisfaction Index, the PC industry received the lowest score, according to a Computerworld story. 'According to the survey, nearly 73% of the people who have bad experiences with their PC companies' call centers said they will consider purchasing their next PCs from another company, while 85% of customers who had their problems resolved by calling a PC call center said they would continue doing business with the company. Other calls centers included in the survey included banking, cell phone service, cable and satellite television, and insurance.'"
Real transcript: AOL: "What type of Mac do you have?" Caller: "Uh...tangerine?"
Having done Mac support, I have to say that getting a response of "tangerine" out of a customer is better than just getting "an iMac" as an answer. At least with the tangerine ones, there were only two or three models made, and they were all very similar. While I certainly see the humor in the post, it was actually a very informative answer.
2 stays because management believes that the person has a clue. And if 1 has a nice enough personality, they will stay as well. 3 will normally move on.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"Tangerine" tells a good Mac tech exactly what type of Mac that user has. It's a "tangerine" iMac with a 266 or 333MHz G3 processor (PPC750, IBM-style, with copper tracing instead of aluminum), between 64 (most likely) and 256 (max) MB of RAM (PC66 168-pin DIMM), a 24x CD-ROM drive, a 4 or 6 GB HDD (ATA/33), 10/100 Ethernet, an ATI Rage Pro LT 8MB video accelerator, and a 17" CRT screen.
But your point stands for other, less-distinctive types of hardware.
My experiences as a techie for some major Fortune 500 companies:
- MOST problems cannot be solved by following a script
- Also, company knowledge bases (for the tech's) are usually outdated, inaccurate and poorly designed
- People ARE willing to pay for tech support
- When I did support for M$, customers of brand name computers with OEM operating systems would call in and ask for support because they couldn't get their problems solved through the OEM call centres (M$ customer service will just charge them of course)
- Customers are rarely angry unless you feed them with bullshit, keep transferring them, constantly put them on hold, etc. If you do like me and actually treat a customer like a decent human being instead of getting them off the phone as soon as possible, then you will probably not get promoted, but you will have a feeling of personal satisfaction that you actually bothered to help the customer solve their problem
Facts:
- most call centres have time limits for tech calls, which means techs are pressured to get people off the phone as soon as possible instead of giving them any type of quality support
- training is often limited to 2 to 3 weeks for a specific product, with much of the training time dedicated to human resources type training, i.e. how to talk to the customer to make them feel like you are helping them, instead of actually giving the techs the technical knowledge to actually solve their problems
- techs often make things up. Yes I've experienced this as a customer and have seen other techs do this. If people don't know the answer, they will just make-up there own answer just so they don't have to deal with the problem (having the customer do something that takes a long time can help to get the customer of the phone, like doing a chkdsk)
- With one company that I was with (that I quit in disgust), a customer told me that he noticed what seemed to be a manufacturers defect in the specific brand of computer. I went to my supervisor and he said this is not true. I asked my supervisor how he knew this since I never even told him the model number. He said "good point, I'll check", about 30 seconds later he said he checked and said there was no default with the product.
- Turnover rate is high in this business. So keeping experienced techs isn't so much an issue as keeping within the short term quarterly profit margin targets
Believe me I could write a whole book about my experiences, but I think you get my point. The only thing that seems to be saving any one company from bankruptcy through customer abandonment is that all companies seem to be colluding with the lie (or exaggeration at least) that they are providing technical support.
Let's face it, if a customer had a choice of saving their computer data or just getting their computer to work properly, they will pay. Often companies with out-of-warranty customers charge $2.00 per minute, often for the same poor technical support. It is a rip-off and a cash grab for the companies involved.