My bank has me on hold, playing music I don’t care to hear, and breaking in annoyingly often to tell me how important I am to them. I know exactly how important I am. My social security check comes to them every month by direct deposit and is gone in a flash.
Truth is, I’m a bottom-feeder in their pond, and they know it.
It’s painfully obvious that we, the richest nation in the world, are now part of what is euphemistically called a ‘service economy.’ Although I’m old enough to remember the good old days when America was an industrial heavyweight, in the brave new world that our service economy has chosen to offer, one settles for what one can get. A steadily diminishing return, at best
In eight minutes and thirty-four seconds, the line clears: “This is Sonja, how may I help you?”
Yes, it’s true. I must admit my wristwatch has a stopwatch feature, and it both frustrates and delights me to keep track. Try timing the IRS or Social Security for a unique test of patience.
Yet, I’m unfailingly kind to these Sonjas of the answering world. They have a rotten job, work diligently at it and the rules are purposefully stacked against them.
Online assistance is designed against its purpose
Those in companies tasked with designing (Adj: concealing crafty designs for advancing your own interest) such services, are made to keep the wait as close to ten minutes as possible.
Any less commits the sin of overstaffing, while longer is okay so long as phone-rage and demands to speak to a manager are held within certain limits. These calls are not recorded for your safety and convenience (as they remind you, for legal reasons) but aimed at cutting costs, trimming staff, and testing the limits callers will accept. There are consequences to this remarkable lack of customer care, and I don’t think any of them are unintended.
It’s interesting to me that ‘customer service’ is deliberately built to piss everyone off within prescribed limits, rather than rated on how satisfied each customer is at the end of the call.
Those who set these rules don’t walk the same online walk as the rest of us
Above a certain paygrade, customers become clients, an interesting juxtaposition. Your calls are never recorded in that rarified atmosphere. To be a client, is to have personal bankers, and (at the very least) direct access to upper managers on the first ring, whenever and wherever they do business. “Good morning, Mr. Jones. How is your lovely wife and how may I be of service today?”
A couple of thousand feet up, at an even more rarified atmosphere, highly paid personal assistants take care of the nitty and gritty of daily life, on the company payroll, of course.
So, you and I are sorted, like blemished bananas
And the Sonjas of the world bear the cost in customer anger. She may have a headache, or a bad cold, a child sick at home, but the system designed for her delivers one blemished banana after another. How different the result might be if she were given the staff, the training and the salary to actually perform a valued service.
Customers become clients under those circumstances.
Underinvestment has its own costs, and it’s not only institutions such as banks that suffer. Remember when hotels shined your shoes overnight, if you left them outside your door and airlines had roomy seats?
That was then and now is now
When you built that automated phone tree to save a few bucks, you chose to lose some of your best customers. Offering rubber chicken and soggy vegetables for the group meeting at your hotel, you choose to send a message of carelessness. And when you poorly train the staff to represent your organization, it’s a choice to put the future of your company on the line.
You can’t get good people to lie for you, not for long. But you can get the best if you train, pay and treat them like the ambassadors they are
L.L.Bean, the hunting and fishing store in Maine has been doing it for over a century. Call them at any hour, day or night, and you’ll be taken care of like sinking into a warm bath. They don’t do it because it’s profitable, they do it because it’s who they are.
If your online service doesn’t work for you, don’t blame staff. Take a look at how you built it. As is true in most things, it’s not difficult to get it right. Put out a product you’re proud of, and staff it to answer the phone by the third ring. Your call center answers a customer you already have.
How much better can it get than that?
