Call center managers must be tired of living in a world of complaints. They must dream about complaints or is it as you suspect, that they don’t actually review any of the complaints prepared and presented by customers? You might remember the days when the customer was always right. These days the customer can’t possibly be right when the call centers find every way of avoiding the main issues of customer complaints.

There are three areas where call center managers can learn from general complaints and to make the customer’s lives easier: location, employees and software.

Location of the call center

Even if the call center is offering deals for customers, location is vital to both the call center employees and for the customer.

So often call centers are located alongside a number of other high profile call centers with management believing that the state or town must be experts at answering (or avoiding) call center questions.

Unfortunately, to make call centers cost productive, management consultants may choose areas in a low salary neighborhood so expectations do not rise too high. Government incentives may direct a company to a certain area or maybe the low cost of real estate proves to be the deciding incentive. Whether anyone thinks about quality employees being available for work, you never know.

So many companies have moved their call centers across to India or other nations and easy access to cheap labor, at the customer’s expense, appears to be the priority.

With so many consultants choosing to locate call centers in the same area, a number of companies are making the same decision and therefore, defeating their very aim; to have sufficient employees available in the area. When so many call centers locate to the same part of town, employee availability disappears.

Finding dependable and professional employees

There are too many supervisors in call centers. They put so much pressure on their employees to perform and achieve impossible results that the negative reaction reaches the customer.

While students filling the traditional call center role may require supervision, many quality people who can’t find other work end up taking a job at a call center. These people probably run homes and a family so supervision is not the main requirement. If people are assessed fairly on their real results, the need for training will become apparent, rather than total time supervision.

Giving call center employees the initiative may help them form an interest in their job, and helping customers may become second nature.

Finding the right employees is not the main problem for call centers; it’s keeping them that’s the toughest part of the management role. So often the job is seen as a way to earn money between jobs, often because of the low pay.

Always blame the software

Call centers live and die by their software. If it doesn’t perform, the future of the business is at risk.

It should be the company that tells the software designers what software they need, having spent countless hours finding out what they do require. Unfortunately, many call centers complain of poor software. This attitude is then passed to the software people for not listening and understanding the requirements of their working models. The software people will always want to pass the blame back to the company for not providing the right brief.

With the high numbers of constant leavers, it must be difficult for managers to train their new employees in overall software use. You know when you get your own home software; it takes hours if not days to learn how to use a new email program properly. Now think about the stress levels at performing the same task in the office with supervisors hounding the employee and the job at risk.

Software provides reports that show that call times are monitored. Employees taking too long on a call are effectively at risk. The other half of the report that management loves to devour is the time employees take between calls. Can they take and end more calls per hour? Management believes this makes employees more efficient when the opposite may become true.

If call center management understood what customers really wanted, they could provide employees with better working conditions. That in would turn help customers, preventing them from telling all their friends about dreadful service and losing that company many more sales. 

By, Rosie Ferris

The company that claims to be the leading speech technology provider has one of the worst self-service support lines that I have ever run into.  When you call 407-241-1822, you don’t even get a basic greeting and identification of who/what you have reached.  Instead, you hear a voice instructing you to go to different website addresses depending on just what you are calling about.  It babbles on about how you should go to this website location if you have purchased the Nuance Dragon LifeStyle product or to another website location if you have purchased the Dragon Gaming Pak product.  While it is babbling away, the keypad is locked so you are forced to listen to the entire spiel.  When it is done, you then get another different voice that again tells you to go to the Nuance website for technical support.  It then announces that “if you are calling about Technical Support, just stay on the line”.  This is what I did.   It then gave me a menu which said that if I was calling about a customer service issue, that I should press 1 and that if it was a Technical Support issue, I should press 2.  I did neither, since it had previously told me to just wait to get to a human.   Thirty minutes later, it was still playing the menu to me in a repetitive fashion.   I now wonder how many hours (days) this would have gone on for.   I finally selected 2 for technical support and got looped back to the same initial message that told me to go to the different websites.    This is an endless loop!   What an awful experience.   They don’t even use their own speech recognition technology.   Heard “please pay attention since our menu has changed a number of times”.   I finally attempted to make a selection based on the instructions.  When  I did this, it hung up on me.

No wonder everyone hates telephone self-service so much.  The self-proclaimed speech industry leader puts together something as awful as this.  They constantly preach about using good practices when implementing telephone self-service, and then turn around and put together something like this for their own customer support line.   Nuance should be ashamed and embarrassed for doing this!

We evaluated the Bank of America telephone self-service line over five (5) years ago when the speech-activated service was first installed.  This month we decided to re-visit it to see if they had fixed any of the many problems that we had previously identified. 

About the only positive thing that was observed was that the BofA telephone self-service did not get much worse than when we originally tested it.  Virtually all of the problems that were identified over five years ago still remain as problems.  BofA now refers to their agents as “associates” and they used to call them “specialists”.

The lack of basic personalization is a real irritation.  After five years, and perhaps 50+ calls, the system still greets me by announcing that I can disable the speech feature and provides detail instructions on how to do it.  I call from the same phone all of the time, so implementing CallerID would make it easy to eliminate this problem.  This is a gross waste of my time. 

Why on earth does it insist on wasting my time telling me things over-and-over each time that I call.

The speech recognition is awful.  It was unable to recognize my access ID or my PIN.  I finally had go to TouchTone in order to access my account.

The entire application is still painfully slow and hard to use.  It is much to verbose.  They disable overstrike, which forces you to listen to their lengthy prompts.  They still don’t tell you how long the wait queue is. 

When you see how really badly the BofA telephone self-service application is implemented, it’s no wonder that users detest telephone self-service so much.

The sentences that the Lernout & Hauspie criminals received were pathethically lenient.  The defendents received 3 year prison sentences and were fined 25,000€.   Bernie Ebbers (MCI Worldcom) and Ken Lay (Enron) each received 25+ year prison sentences.  They also forfeited virtually all of their personal assets which were in the hundreds of millions of $s.Their fraud was also a bit more sophisticated than what the L&H folks did, which was just gross. None of the L&H criminals ever admitted that they committed the fraud. 

The Belgian legal systems appears to be really pretty awful for honest people.  It took a decade to obtain the 1^st conviction.  Now, of course, they will appeal the verdicts.  Highly unlikely that the L&H criminals will ever actually go to prison.

If you commit financial fraud, you should do it in Belgium.

Every time that a caller provides their credit card information to a human agent, they are running a high risk that they will be the victim of identity theft.  For call centers that are taking calls that originate in the state of Massachusetts, they are in direct violation of the the new data privacy law that went into effect on March 1, 2010.

 

The Massachusetts Data Privacy law states that all businesses that collect personal data from or about Massachusetts residents will need to adopt a comprehensive written security program. Unlike most state-based data privacy laws, which focus primarily on public disclosure once a breach occurs, the new Massachusetts law prescribes that more stringent protective measures be taken to prevent breaches from occurring in the first place.

 

With the use of existing technology, call centers could readily eliminate the security breach point.  The caller would enter their private information via the IVR and the agent would never see it.  The only flaw with this approach is that the agent must utilize the computer telephone integration (CTI) capability.  If the agent asks the caller for their credit card information, then we still have a security breach point. How do we solve this?

 

Real straightforward:  Monitor what the agent is saying with speech analytics.  If they ever ask the caller for their credit card information, they are shut down.

Fort Lauderdale area volunteer needed for national TV story on Get2Human.  Anyone in the Ft Lauderdals area that is interested in participating?  They are looking for people to interview that have used Get2Human and are willing to provide a soundbite about their experience with it.  If you are interested, send us your contact

Welcome to the Get2Human blog. 

The Get2Human™ movement was created from the voices of millions of consumers who want to be treated with dignity when they contact an enterprise for customer support.  Our goal is to convince enterprises that providing high quality customer service and having satisfied customers costs much less than providing low quality customer service and having unsatisfied customers. We encourage you to post your call center stories (good/bad), opinions about how call centers should operate and anything that would help enhance our gethuman database of gethumans (new companies to add or invalid Get2Humans).  It is our goal that the voice of the consumer will be heard and listened to and that automated call center systems will improve and work better for the consumers!!

The response from consumers to gethuman.com has been tremendous. People are fed up with phone systems that prevent them from getting good customer service, and are increasingly frustrated by the technology that businesses have put in place to keep them from getting to an actual human being. This web site has been a place for consumers to share information, vent frustrations, and draw attention to those businesses that provide good service options to callers, through our Great Customer Service Club.

Consumers also need to know about some of the underlying reasons why most telephone customer service is so bad. The following was sent to me by someone that believes that one of those reasons is a near-monopoly in the computer speech industry.

We all know that monopolies are bad for consumers. If the phone company was still a monopoly, we'd all be waiting weeks to have a Princess Phone installed. Cell phones would still be science fiction. Although some people think that Microsoft is a monopoly in the computer industry, if it really were a monopoly, we wouldn't have Apple laptops, iPods, and browsers from Mozilla, Google, and others. The Internet has been a boon to consumers because so small companies can easily compete to produce products to make our lives easier or more enjoyable, such as MySpace, Facebook, Amazon, eBay, etc.

Nuance Communications makes software for speech recognition, so that callers can speak to telephone systems ("Customer service please"). They also make software that allows the telephone system to speak to callers ("Your checking account balance is forty-seven dollars"). Most people hate these systems. But if done well, many people like these systems and prefer them to pressing 1 for this, 2 for that, etc. In a world of competition, lots of companies would develop these systems, and the companies that design systems that work well would succeed, and companies that produce the terrible systems that we have to deal with today would quickly go out of business.

But Nuance doesn't want competition. They've gone out and bought up most of the companies that used to compete with them. When new companies come along to compete with them, they threaten expensive lawsuits that allege infringement of their patent portfolio. Nuance isn't interested in making life easier for consumers, they just want to sell their consumer un-friendly systems. They don't invest in R&D to create better systems for consumers, they just invest in buying their competitors so they don't have to compete. This strategy is anti-consumer, anti-capitalist, and even anti-American. The result is frustrating phone systems that keep consumers from getting good customer service.

If you agree, tell the people at Nuance to stop bullying their competitors. Tell them that you want open competition. The CEO of Nuance Communications is Paul Ricci and you can email him at: paul.ricci@nuance.com

Report a company you want added to the gethuman list. Or if you see a request and know what the phone# and gethuman is, post that here.  Our researchers will find and/or validate the gethuman and add it to the database as soon as they can.