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For whom the phone rings

You know that feeling, you are unhappy or frustrated with a product and you finally get to the point where you have to call the company to get a resolution. So, you pick up the phone and you get:

1. A recording telling you to either wait or leave a message
2. A customer service person who isn’t able to answer your question, because they don’t know the product well enough and therefore they aren’t listening to your specific question
3. You get that one guy who thinks you are the problem, not the company’s product, and he acts like you have inconvenienced him by calling

Instead of helping, you are left more frustrated and, well, probably annoyed - at this point - and if you have a blog, you are probably going to tell the world about the terrible customer service experience you just had.

Seth Godin just had an experience with a call center that he wrote about on his blog, in a post called:

Who answers the phone?

This was my take away line from that post:

“Shouldn’t you be rewarding call center operators by how long they keep people on the phone, not how many calls they can handle a minute?”

Seth often says things I agree with, but this one nailed it on the head for me. Back in the mid 90’s, I took a seasonal customer service job with a children’s educational CD-Rom distribution company.

After only weeks of being there, I had broken the company record with 81% upsells on calls. (Upsells means ‘add-on purchases’ - think “Do you want fries with that burger?”)

In this case, the upsells were things the company had put on sale for the week. So, I would let the caller know we also had some sale items and if they were interested, I’d be glad to tell them about them. It was easy and natural for me, because I felt like it was helping the caller. After all, who doesn’t like a sale, and the customer was trying to get their holiday shopping done and wanted help finding appropriate gifts.

They were usually delighted to find someone offering assistance, as if that was a rare occurrence. So, I would ask the child’s age and interests, then I’d take the upsell list of items for that week and tell them about an item that fit their specific gift-giving needs.

The caller was happy to get their shopping done and I got a dollar for each upsell they purchased, so I figured the company must be happy with me. And two of my managers, Vicki and Mitchell, told me I was not only outselling all the other seasonal help, but I had also outsold all the full time customer service reps, too.

So, you can bet I was surprised when the ‘other’ manager came to me and said:

“Bethany, I am very upset with your stats. Why are you on the phone for 8 mins when everyone else’s average call time is under 3 minutes?”

I asked if he thought it might have anything to do with the fact I had outsold the rest of the staff and broken the company record. I also reminded him several callers had ask to speak to my supervisor, because - as one told me:

“I have never had such a great experience calling this or any other catalog company before!”

I found out most people reserve the ‘conversation with the manager’ call for when they are registering a complaint, so now I make sure I ask for a manager when I get excellent customer service.

But back to that ‘other’ manager, it still urks me, to this day. It’s not just because it happened to me, though ego-wise, that was a factor, at the time. The real reason it bothered me was because I immediately understood why I had outsold everyone else: It was my first experience within a call center and I was naive to the fact that they were even monitoring my call time, so I just did what was natural and helpful to the client. But that experience made me realize that the company (who by the way closed its doors shortly after that holiday season, due to a merger with Mattel) didn’t care about the customer’s experience, because they were too focused on the wrong stats.

When I read Seth’s post about call centers the above story was just one of my many thoughts on the subject. His post brings up a valid point: who IS answering your company’s phone and - even if it can’t be the brand manager, as Seth suggests, shouldn’t they be trained appropriately, to eliminate the clients’ frustrations, not enhance them?

Granted, I know you can’t have upper management answer every call or predict every customer’s unique situation, but there should be well trained people answering the phone, not the newest hire. And, as Seth points out, there should be a way to escalate a call, when needed.

For instance, yesterday I called my bank. On Saturday, I had been to a restaurant and used my card to pay the bill. The restaurant ran the charge and the bank withdrew the money on Monday.

On Tuesday, the restaurant authorized the same charge, a second time.

Now, I know it was probably an error on the restaurant’s behalf, but still that is $72 bucks I’d rather not pay them for twice (especially since the dinner wasn’t that great).

When I called my bank, the guy explained it was still just an authorization, but he was going to put me through to the “dispute department” anyway.

When the woman from the dispute department got on the phone with me, it was already handled. Her first words were, “I have a feeling this charge will drop off, but I have already put a note in the account, if it does go through we will dispute it for you immediately.”

That was that. I wasn’t required to wait to see if it would get charged to my account, like I had experienced in the past with authorizations (’just wait and see’ mentality). I wasn’t told I would have to contact the restaurant, like I had been told in the past (’it’s not our problem’ mentality). I was, instead, told, “don’t worry, we’re here and it’s our job to help.”

Wouldn’t it be great if that was the answer every time you called a company with a legitimate concern!

Thanks, Seth, for another great and thought-provoking read.

If you have a customer call center, maybe you should be thinking of your staff as ‘marketing representatives’ for your company, instead of perceiving the caller as the problem or an annoyance you have to deal with to get business done.

Remember, everyone who interacts with your clients makes an impression…

Tags: customer service, marketing, Seth Godin

Add comment April 9th, 2008

Follow Up to Skype/Oprah campaign

I thought I’d write a follow up for my last post entitled Oprah, Skype and the Book Club:

I did have a chance to watch the taped version of this ‘premiere’ use of Skype for Oprah’s Book Club with author Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth: Awaking Your Life’s Purpose

If you haven’t read my last post, it was not a review about the book, but (since this is a marketing related blog) more an examination about the marketing behind the event. I am still fascinated by this campaign, it is a rather impressive idea. And, though I don’t often have clients with the budget of Harpo Products (Oprah’s multimedia production company), I do like to watch how they are doing this and conceptualize how I can create scaled down versions for appropriate clients.

For clarification of #4 on the last post: They do use pre-selected “Skyper” (viewers with a video camera on their computer, who talk via Skype) and do mention Skype a great deal. Though Oprah confesses she had never heard of Skype before, she acknowledges how cool it is to be able to have people (sitting in their homes) talk with her on videocams. She had people from across the U.S. and a woman based in Germany call in on Skype. She also used ‘emails’ and the ‘phone’ to talk with other individuals across the globe.

Now, to be fair, other marketers have already started using Skype for group meetings. Last year, Ed Dale (located in Australia) of StomperNet did a series of Skype calls with members, across the globe, in StomperSimple. And I am sure there were others, before him. But Oprah’s group has done it on a grander scale:

Obviously, this new example is a high profile (meaning: high budget) campaign - more like an interactive live Internet TV-style show - it was stated that 500,000 people watched the live version of this, and, as of the other day, 1.5 million have downloaded the pre-recorded version (either from Oprah.com or iTunes).

Yet, as ready as the Harpo team was for this experiment, there were still complications. Though, to their credit, the group is taking ownership and finding ways to resolve them. It seems, many viewers didn’t get to actually watch it live. So, they are responding by asking people to show up early to the next “class” and emphasizing this is a new media that they are exploring. They wrote, in a reminder email (about access to the next installment): “If you’re willing to partner with us in exploring this new frontier, we’ll see you in class on Monday!”

They also remind people they can download each class, afterwards, if they can’t get on the live call. I like that they are being proactive for the next class. Also, I like the availability of the downloads, I know I am not going to spend my Monday night watching the live version. I’d rather watch it on my own terms, which reiterates my constant reminder to my clients that the need to make their webinars or even newsletters available in a variety of ways. That’s why I love blogs: You can post links (without HTML knowledge) to pre-recorded webinars, archive past newsletters, and more… This way, a month from now someone new can find it and utilize the info. So, you don’t need a budget like Oprah has to achieve a lot of these results (though you may have a smaller audience, you can still make a big impact).

As a marketing tool, I think this combination of Virtual Classroom and Skype accessed students is a great experiment to witness - I am sure many people will follow on what they are creating. I know I am already brainstorming ideas.

And, yes, as a viewer, I am also enjoying it. It is self-help oriented, but is ‘bigger’ than ones-self. And it is not limiting, like The Secret has been accused of being. (The Secret seemed to leave out the step about taking action, and they focused too much on material gain.) Though I have not read Tolle’s book, this workshop, based on the book, isn’t like that, it seems to be more about “awareness” and getting past our individual ‘egos’ - Now, I am sure, as with all things in life, there is not a lot of new content in this book, just a ‘re-visiting’ of it, but maybe it is a re-visiting in a way that more of the main-stream can understand and take action on it! So bravo to Oprah and Eckhart for doing this.

The other thing that I liked, from a viewer’s point, was that they make it clear that Eckhart is not trying to be a guru or a prophet. He is just a guy who took his ideas and wrote them in a way that he hopes can help others. Yes, he is making money off of it, but his intent seems genuine after watching the first installment. Let me know (by posting below), if you disagree.

Though, I have to say, I downloaded the video recording and there is a weird glitch that happens when I watch it on my computer: On occasion, for no apparent reason, the recording will jump back to a section I have already listened to, not to the beginning, but an earlier section. It seems to always take me back to one of 3 sections. I found it quite amusing though, because it was always interesting stuff that I might not have listened to sharply enough the first time (since I listened to it in the background, as I worked). So, I would laugh at myself and re-listen more focused, the second time. And, when it happened a 3rd time, I could also just use the forward option, to go back to ‘the future’ space where I had last heard new content.

Like everything on the web, there were glitches, but overall the campaign (and for me, the content, as well) was worth following along.

Let me know your thoughts on either the marketing campaign, the content, or even my use of this example on this blog, by posting below.

Tags: book club, marketing, Oprah, promotions, Skype

1 comment March 9th, 2008