MoneyWatch

Is Your Call Center Shafting Customers?

By Geoffrey James

Updated on: February 4, 2009 / 1:01 PM EST / MoneyWatch

Is your call center screwing up those hard-won customer relationships? If so, you might want to prepare yourself to be yelled at, next time you call your customer contacts.

In the post "How to Show Your Customers You Despise Them" in BNET's Sterling Performance blog, the extraordinarily clever Jo Owen provides a list of ways that call centers drive customers crazy, including:

Hiding the call center number so people won't call.
Making the call center a toll call from your customer's region.
Multiple menu picks with "talking to a human" at the end of the list.
Putting callers on hold for a long time before contacting a live operator.
Playing idiotic and annoying music while callers are on hold.
Repeating "we value your call" messages, when it's clear they do not.
Hiring undertrained, underpaid call center agents.
Asking callers to provide complicated registration numbers, multiple times.

(Jo's description of these behaviors is really funny, so please read his post if you want a LOL experience.) To Jo's list, I'd like to add:

Putting angry callers on hold indefinitely, hoping they'll hang up. Yeah, they'll deny up and down that they do it, but forcing angry callers to "cool their heels" is standard operating procedure. And if you're really steamed, they'll just wait until you go away.
Supervisors who have no more authority than the call center agents. It's the drones leading the drones in call center land. The "supervisor" is really just another agent whose presence on the line gives the illusion that you're getting some respect. You're not.
"Voice recognition" software that can't recognize your voice. I once spent five minutes trying to get Hewlett Packard's automated phone system to understand the name of my old colleague "Dilip Phadke." No way could it decode that name.
Suggestions that you use their website and find the answer yourself. My ISP runs this message every time I call to complain that the Internet is down. And even if I can get on the Internet, I want help from the call center, not a do-it-yourself pointer.

Of course, we all know exactly why companies implement these policies; they're trying to reduce the cost of customer support. And the software vendors that provide these systems have studies showing that you can save money (in the short term) by irritating your unhappy customers to the point where they just go away.

Unfortunately, all of this leaves a BAD taste in the mouths of customers... and makes it very difficult to sell to them in the future. There are five or six companies with whom I simply will no longer deal -- due to their horrible call center support.

And I diss them to my friends, family and readers, basically at every opportunity. I'm sure the bad publicity has more than made up for the pennies that they saved by giving me the runaround.

READERS: Have you ever had a bad experience with a call center?