This is the first of a regular series of blogs written to shine some light into some of the dark corners where both poor and good service is hindering or helping the customer and thereby damaging or improving the performance of the organisation. Much will be founded on the basis of personal experience and it would be good to uncover whether these observations are widely shared. So if they strike a chord with you please let us know.
Buttons, Messages and Music - It isn’t working!
It seems impossible to call any organisation on the telephone without being first of all told via a recorded, usually female, voice that
“Your call may be monitored for quality and service training purposes”
or words to that effect.
A decade or so ago those of us aware of the importance of service quality and interested in its continual improvement were heartened initially by the emergence of this activity, for here was a genuine source for researching the customer’s experience at their interface with the organisation to provide a deeper understanding of the needs of the customer and the competence of the staff in fulfilling such needs.
So after 10 years of listening to these messages the message back to them is…
IT ISN’T WORKING!
I cannot be alone in believing that telephone service quality has significantly declined and continues to fall at a rate that challenges Newton’s laws on the force of gravity. After over a decade of this an anticipated out come of “Your call may be monitored for quality and service training purposes” would surely have been a telephone response team increasingly sensitive to the finer points of service quality using highly developed processes that managed the service delivery nuances emerging from different customer groups.
How naïve could we be?
Instead, after being greeted with the above “warning”, positioned almost as a threat by some organisations, the customer is confronted by an ever increasing series of digitally managed push button options which seem designed to escalate the sense of mild irritation generated by the initial warning to a level of incandescent rage that threatens to pressure test the very fabric of the human arterial system.
So why do they do it?
Hard to say but it is not difficult to imagine the dead hand of some corporate accountant on the tiller of the decision to implement such a system, probably based on operational cost savings alone without any kind of wider customer value analysis – (and of course as the cost of such analysis would have to be found from somewhere so why not save that cost too!)
Do these organisations actually listen to the recordings?
It appears clear that no one with the slightest sense or sensibility about service quality management is ever involved with the feedback. That is even if such recordings are actually made and listened to for any “back of an envelope” calculation rapidly arrives at the conclusion that the volume of data generated is impossible to manage even at the lowest representative sample levels, so it seems nothing is done, the farce continues to become ever more elaborate and customers are forced to suffer the consequences.
There are certain sectors that have taken this push button pain to even higher levels of excruciation with telecoms, financial services and utilities being among the finest at telephonically inspired customer irritation. Perhaps they can get away with it because they enjoy an operational climate in which switching supplier is either so complex or tedious they can push their luck with their customers who may be increasingly at risk of repetitive stress syndrome induced by pushing the buttons on their telephones. Now a new dimension is being added to the initial “warning”, one that warns that the organisation will not tolerate staff abuse.
Do they not understand that it is the irritation caused by their infernal processes that is driving normally quiet and polite customers to vent their frustration on the first poor soul to whom they can actually speak? After having to pay to hear a loop of some rotten scratchy music and being told “Your call is important to us” for the tenth time the patience of a saint would be stretched to breaking point. Not that this makes customers actually believe their call is important to anyone nor does the other often peddled dissemblance that “the majority of customers prefer automated systems”
So what to do?
A number of options are available
- Just answer the telephone.
- If organisations really want to know what customers think do not record the conversations but instead do record what customers are screaming down the telephone between the stupid button pressing, the terrible music and the insincere messages of care.
- If push button options are used just have two “Please select from the following two options. If you have heard our options before and none meet your needs press 1, if you have not please press 2 to listen to the options as they may get you to the right person more quickly – Thank you”
- Set up the system for the convenience of the customer, not the corporate accountant
To finish on a personal example of the lack of thinking that goes into telephone response systems. Here is one from among many I have collected. On the 1st of January 2010 at around 11:30 pm a power cut blacked out the village where I lived. By torch light I searched the electricity company’s (EON’s ) invoice documentation for an emergency number. Not there, I eventually found it in the telephone book. No electricity meant no landline telephone so I called their emergency service on my mobile. The opening recorded message welcomed me, then the recorded message asked me to enter my landline telephone number into my keypad. It is tricky holding a torch and a mobile and doing this in the dark requires the dexterity of a circus juggler. The recorded voice then thanked me; my assumption was that I would now be put through to an operator. No. The customer care team at EON had obviously decided that at 1130 at night, a customer in an emergency suffering from a power failure, on the coldest night of the year and already frustrated by their telephone button pushing process was the ideal candidate to be asked to participate in a customer satisfaction survey!
Obviously the very old adage of “First fix the customer” has not percolated into the depths of Europe’s power supply industry.
I also enjoyed the Nationwide Building Society’s endurance test that takes the customer all the way through the buttons, messages and music finally to be told by the sincere electronic recording, “All our operators are busy call back later” and then disconnects.
So is telephone service working for you, do you believe what you are being told, is it getting better or worse? Please let us have your experiences of dealing on the telephone and how you feel the process could be improved as we enter into a new decade.
Philip Forrest ACII, FCIM, CM, FICSI
The View of the Osprey
Cofounder – The International Customer Service Institute
