Call Centre Voicemail And Why It's A Bad Thing

Description

One of the frustrations of modern life is never being able to talk to anyone in a company to resolve a problem. Just about any call you make gets fielded by an automated centre that tries to funnel your query via a menu system; all very well except nine times out of ten your particular query doesn’t fit their canned options and you have to bide your time until the end of the option menu and hold for a real person to talk to.

Voicemail may be the time-motion cure for companies, but they seem blind to the fact that it drives their customers absolutely nuts. There cannot be many who don’t feel something curl up and die inside them as soon as they hear the dreaded phrase “please select from the following options”, knowing this is twenty minutes of their life they will never get back. I’ve even dealt with a company where every call, even during working hours, went on to an automated voicemail system asking for your details so they could call you back . . . eventually.

Phone support should be as clinical and to-the-point as possible, not some kind of mind game trying to persuade the caller that the operator isn’t working through a written process sheet. I’m not going to marvel at the call centre banalities, I’m going to be more impressed if I get the problem sorted or connected quickly to someone who can deal with it effectively, it occurs to me that a lot of customers would be more polite off the bat if they realised this would be the norm.

Perhaps it is just me, but an increasing amount of companies appear to be using their phone service to push their customers further away than actually using this as a direct and immediate channel to engage with their market. It could be that as these systems save time and money for a company, we’ll have to put up with more and more of these automated call handling systems and accept that what’s best for the company is best for us too. However what really stands out to a customer is when people go that extra mile and make the time and effort to go the extra mile in connecting with you and your issue.

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