Far From Being Right, The Customer is Upset and Telling Others

This weekend in the New York Times there was an article (found here) that brought up the age old question of, "When I call a company for service, why can't I talk to someone?". I think this article brought up a good point about companies not being interested in service so much as saving money. When this happens, customers talk about it.

Complaining about bad customer service is such a sport now that it should be an Olympic event. But I am curious about how it devolved into this, if there is anything I can do about it and if it is ever going to change.

A little history: These interactive voice response systems, known as I.V.R., which recognize speech or touch tones, began in earnest in the 1980s, and the idea was that they would cut costs by reducing the number of people a company needed to respond to customer complaints.

The trouble is, companies were more interested in saving money than customer retention.

If companies don't focus on retention and loyalty when they interact with customers, then what happens most of the time? Customer get upset and then find another company to do business with.

For the first time, American corporations are acknowledging “customer service as something worth paying for rather than just red ink,” said Dr. Jon Anton, who looks at call centers worldwide and, using a number of criteria, compares how well they work. “If you can satisfy customers and keep them buying, it’s as important as marketing.”

So, what are consumers doing about it? They are taking it right to the Internet. Will this help or hurt?

gethuman.com, in particular, provides a community for consumers to exchange information. Walt Tetschner, the director of the Get Human Web site, is an engineer by trade and now a consumer advocate. The Web site has been up for about two and a half years and has 10,000 visitors a day.

In May, the site also began asking visitors to rank those companies with great customer service. It then lists them on its Web site.

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Speech Technology Magazine - Secret Agents: The hidden value of someone behind the scenes

Spoken Communications compares its agent-assisted interactive voice response (IVR) technology to the U-Scan brand. The Seattle-based company has carved a place for itself in the crowded contact center industry by selling a single product it says solves three major IVR-related problems: hold times, opt-out rates, and speech recognition errors. Using a technology that has been called everything from guided IVR to Wizard of Oz IVR, Spoken’s technology takes a hybrid approach to call handling, one that presents a front of nearly perfect natural language capabilities. Whether experts call this a clever trick or an insightful business decision, Spoken says it uses both an IVR and a human agent to achieve its goal of near-perfect call routing and increased customer satisfaction.

The company’s agent-assisted IVRs rely on silent agents who work behind the scenes of inbound customer calls. Listening in on several calls simultaneously, agents route callers to what they think is the most appropriate department after the customer answers only one synthesized question, How may I help you? As the call progresses, agents keep gathering information and continue routing calls as they see fit. Opting out is still a choice, but the company claims its technology boasts an almost 70 percent completion rate. And, with one agent handling multiple calls at once, Spoken has found that agent productivity increases fourfold.

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