4 ms·

I'm mostly glad to see a lot of reasonable responses to this. This attitude is one of the reasons why so many people have such terrible experiences calling in

I'm mostly glad to see a lot of reasonable responses to this. This attitude is one of the reasons why so many people have such terrible experiences calling in to companies. I'm talking about companies that have nothing to do with real life emergencies and life threatening consequences. Management tends to think "they just answer phones, so we can hire anyone, put them through a week of training and bam, they should be good to go, right?" I work in a pretty standard e-commerce environment. I was in training for awhile, and now some data analysis and software development. It's like just about anything else. Predict how long you think it will take to competently train someone and triple it. It's not easy to get people ready to handle the majority of the calls you get in a call center, and it's really really hard to get them to handle the absurd number of one-offs you might have. Again, that's without even considering the number of call types and the weight of the calls I'd imagine 911 operators get, all while having to stay polite and calm. Two months for a 911 operator in a major city like NY sounds kind of nutty to me, especially if the training is in the format I'm expecting it would be, and not something totally out of the box.

300bps 13y ago
This attitude is one of the reasons why so many people have such terrible experiences calling in to companies...Management tends to think "they just answer phones, so we can hire anyone, put them through a week of training and bam, they should be good to go, right?" You've missed the mark pretty terribly on this. The reason why so many people have such terrible experiences calling in to companies is because of substantial training. People in call centers today are trained to give you poor customer service. I can't tell you how many scripts I've seen that are written like: 1. If customer asks for X, tell them we can't do that 2. If customer insists, explain we can't do X because of A, B and C. 3. If customer still insists for X, tell them we can't do X but we are willing to do Y 4. If customer still insists for X, tell them we will call them back and then don't call them back. 5. If customer calls back for X, give them X And these types of scripts are written for things where a company is legally obligated to give their customer X. Sure, there are training issues but by far you are receiving poor customer service because the company doesn't really want you calling in the first place and they're training you not to call.
- doorhammer 13y ago
  Well, I did say "one of the reasons", but you're rights that it as implicit that was the main reason. I also should have prefaced that this has been my own personal experience in call centers. What you're saying is definitely a problem in some (maybe most) call centers. Companies tend to see call centers as places where money goes to die, instead of a potential treasure trove of information about their customers and what's going wrong or right with their strategies. I think that does lead to what you're talking about. Everything becomes about low balling the customer. If they have a return, you try to give them ten bucks to keep it. If they think the item is broken, you tell them why it's normal for the item to be that way. I'll be the first to admit that I underplay that portion because my financial situation is fairly good and I'd leave a company that acted that way. It's misguided and doesn't do anything for building your brand. I'd take that a step further, though, and say that your scenario suffers from another big problem. Some call centers place a huge priority on wrote scripting and the customer ends up feeling like they never stopped talking to the IVR. Some reps can put life into a script, but most can't, and you end up with a really sterile, impersonal experience that screams "you're a statistic to us." My personal experience has been, the more you can let your reps drop the script, the higher your CSAT/NPS scores will climb (obviously to a point). Of course, people have guidelines, but I tend to think most of those go too far. If you're in a brick and mortar retail shop, you don't usually have someone hiding behind a shelf marking down whether or not you used the customers name 2.3 times during the interaction. And I should mention that this is going to change depending on the type of business. An e-commerce site processing a return isn't going to be quite as mired in legal scripting as a financial institution laying out the terms of a loan. As a final note, I'll get back to the 911 operator context. Yes, the article is written in a way to elicit a response. I'm not going to hold it up the standards of a well-respected peer-reviewed journal article. I still absolutely think you're wrong with that one, for a lot of reasons others have spoken on. It's not in any way implausible or hyperbolic to think a 911 call center would take two months to adequately train a rep, especially if they're using fairly standard training practices.

300bps 13y ago

This attitude is one of the reasons why so many people have such terrible experiences calling in to companies...Management tends to think "they just answer phones, so we can hire anyone, put them through a week of training and bam, they should be good to go, right?" You've missed the mark pretty terribly on this. The reason why so many people have such terrible experiences calling in to companies is because of substantial training. People in call centers today are trained to give you poor customer service. I can't tell you how many scripts I've seen that are written like: 1. If customer asks for X, tell them we can't do that 2. If customer insists, explain we can't do X because of A, B and C. 3. If customer still insists for X, tell them we can't do X but we are willing to do Y 4. If customer still insists for X, tell them we will call them back and then don't call them back. 5. If customer calls back for X, give them X And these types of scripts are written for things where a company is legally obligated to give their customer X. Sure, there are training issues but by far you are receiving poor customer service because the company doesn't really want you calling in the first place and they're training you not to call.

doorhammer 13y ago
Well, I did say "one of the reasons", but you're rights that it as implicit that was the main reason. I also should have prefaced that this has been my own personal experience in call centers. What you're saying is definitely a problem in some (maybe most) call centers. Companies tend to see call centers as places where money goes to die, instead of a potential treasure trove of information about their customers and what's going wrong or right with their strategies. I think that does lead to what you're talking about. Everything becomes about low balling the customer. If they have a return, you try to give them ten bucks to keep it. If they think the item is broken, you tell them why it's normal for the item to be that way. I'll be the first to admit that I underplay that portion because my financial situation is fairly good and I'd leave a company that acted that way. It's misguided and doesn't do anything for building your brand. I'd take that a step further, though, and say that your scenario suffers from another big problem. Some call centers place a huge priority on wrote scripting and the customer ends up feeling like they never stopped talking to the IVR. Some reps can put life into a script, but most can't, and you end up with a really sterile, impersonal experience that screams "you're a statistic to us." My personal experience has been, the more you can let your reps drop the script, the higher your CSAT/NPS scores will climb (obviously to a point). Of course, people have guidelines, but I tend to think most of those go too far. If you're in a brick and mortar retail shop, you don't usually have someone hiding behind a shelf marking down whether or not you used the customers name 2.3 times during the interaction. And I should mention that this is going to change depending on the type of business. An e-commerce site processing a return isn't going to be quite as mired in legal scripting as a financial institution laying out the terms of a loan. As a final note, I'll get back to the 911 operator context. Yes, the article is written in a way to elicit a response. I'm not going to hold it up the standards of a well-respected peer-reviewed journal article. I still absolutely think you're wrong with that one, for a lot of reasons others have spoken on. It's not in any way implausible or hyperbolic to think a 911 call center would take two months to adequately train a rep, especially if they're using fairly standard training practices.