Confusing a call center for customer support Kills your marketing efforts

It 'was recently (sadly) come to my attention that there are many companies out there who think they have a call center is a nice way to kill two birds with one stone by answering the phone and provide customer service. There have been several times recently that I contacted a company for a number of reasons and could not get a satisfactory solution from the call center employee who answered. I started to ask for a phone number to contact someone who works at the company today, and I was surprised to discover that most of the companies I've dealt with using call centers there are other employees trained and designated to assist the customer.

I really focused on this issue recently, when my Project Manager, Kelly, got a new printer (I'm not one for throwing stones, so I will not name brand, but I will say that it rhymes with "smache p "). He got home, set it up and it would not print. Kelly is a smart girl, she checked the manual and did a little 'problem solving, including checking ink levels, which estimates that had a lot of ink (it was after all a new printer that came with a new cartridge of ink). So, he called the 800 number and within a few minutes (double figures) was talking with someone who was difficult to understand, that has asked for all types of personal information, and then asked a series of canned, rapid fire troubleshooting.

All this ended in determining that, even if the printer is "estimated" a moderate level of ink, and even if it was a new ink cartridge from the manufacturer, not really just put the ink in the cartridge to really do something different from that of alignment test. "It 's just an estimate," he said. Then immediately hit with a sales pitch to order more ink. She politely declined (she is a proper Brit, you know), hung up and went to the store for more ink. Not good.

This experience has hit close to home, I did some research to find a new telecommunications provider for my business, and determined which company we used. We felt very confident about this choice since this company is associated with another well-known companies that currently do business with. I called on a Monday and 40 minutes invested in creating an account, and "Paul" assured me that he would receive an email with all the information I would need access to our account and set the day after our greetings .

Of course, 3 days later, I received emails and initiated an online chat with a customer service representative (I can not keep the phone more than I). He kept me the same questions over and over again, "what is your address? This account has been set up by phone? What is your e-mail? This account has been set up by the phone?" I finally gave in and asked him to only call me. He said they were experiencing "system problems" the day I created our account (just my luck ...) and that he would overcome the Sales Department I thought it would be put on hold while he completed a seller about the problem and that would be connected to him or her. WRONG. I was immediately bounced by car nightmare-hold, listening to awful, static-y music on hold for over 10 minutes. M E N T I N U T E S! Hold time is like dog years, multiply by 7 and that's how long it feels to a person on hold. Finally, a seller collected and I have to start everything from scratch. I lost another 45 minutes setting up my account again. I ended the call asking if there was someone at the phone company that I could actually talk about the situation and they told me that there was "a designated contact with the customer at the company." I wanted to scream. But I did not. I hung up wondering what our long term relationship with this company would be like.

The lesson learned from these experiences? Too many companies rely on employees of call centers to meet the obligations of the customer. They do not. They do not care about your company. They do not care about your goals, products, culture, or philosophy and certainly are not thinking outside the box to solve a problem. They are sitting in a booth reading a script on a screen, drink a Big Gulp, looking at his watch (I know first-hand, one of my first jobs in high school was in a call center).

So this rant by far the customer service is really about marketing your business-Think of all the marketing dollars that were spent to get Kelly to buy that printer, or for that phone service to get our business, and think about the cost of customer acquisition. It 's all wasted when it relies on customer service call center in a third. Give your customers a series in which someone who cares and can help them answer the phone and kill the call center!...