“For option 5, press the pound sign, and leave your message after the tone.”
If you’re like me, you’ve often wondered who’s on the other side of the beep. Has your constructive criticism been routed to the chairman of the board, or to that black hole in the outer reaches of deep space?
Never before has a civilization given so much lip service to “listen to the customer.” Never has a world built bigger walls to getting those lips listened to. I’ve grown fond of calling this way of doing business as “the earplug economy.”
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That’s why I was so heartened to read a first-rate article in The New York Times by William C. Taylor. It’s titled: “Your Call Should Be Important to Us, but It’s Not.”
“How can companies listen to their customers if those customers have such a hard time reaching a human being when they call?” Taylor quips.
The Times and The Boston Globe have both covered a leading campaigner in this war against the soundproof walls of corporate America. His name is Paul M. English, and you can click on to his spirited message at www.gethuman.com.
It’s English’s plan to “publish a list of the best and worst mass-market consumer companies in the United States, based on how long it takes to get to a human on the phone and on the quality of support received.” The Web site includes a thought-probing blog, including this “disconnect” insight from one of English’s contacts: “Big company marketing departments will often spend 25 bucks or more to get a new customer to talk with. … Big company customer service departments do everything they can to not talk with customers.”
Another blog entry from a sales rep at a leading computer company pointed out that being helpful to someone who wasn’t a hot prospect actually hurt his bonus. It’s partly based on the ratio of systems sold to calls taken.
Take a look at your own phone system. Are false economies helping or strangling customer communications?
*There can be good reasons for separating service and sales, but do you penalize salespeople for helping customers who need service or answers?
*If you have a general voice mailbox, is someone routinely checking how long it takes for inquiries to be answered? (Ditto for answers to people who are asked to e-mail their inquiries.)
*Don’t assume that a small-potatoes question isn’t linked to a big-banana deal. People often form their impression of companies based on how they handle the little things. Remember, little things mean everything.
*Design your phone system – and especially access to a human voice – with potential callers in mind. One firm I know launched a great community service program. So good, it stirred a wealthy philanthropist to call up wanting to know where she could send an eye-popping check to help out the cause. The stirring stopped cold when she got so tangled up in the company’s phone maze that she just hung up in frustration.
For a firm, that kind of phone service is like hanging a sandwich board around your neck: If you don’t want to talk about what I want to talk about, don’t bug me.
*Let’s say you’re a small company and feel you can’t afford a full-time operator. Could you join ranks with several other small businesses to co-fund an operator who answers different lines with different company names? If you do this, make sure the operator has the judgment to juggle and route calls sensibly.
Are there firms out there practicing state-of-the-art customer phone practices? Perhaps none is better than the Dutch financial giant ING, which has a hefty presence in the United States. Take their online banking. According to the Times author, calls to ING “are answered by full-time employees who don’t rely on scripted answers and don’t work under strict time limits.” If that sounds like it’s opening a Pandora’s box, think again. Taylor reports “the average ING Direct customer calls the bank only 1.6 times a year.”
Mackay’s Moral: A customer call should be a 911 for a business. Imagine 911 with a recorded message! n
Harvey Mackay is author of The New York Times best seller “Pushing the Envelope.” He can be reached through his Web site, www.mackay.com; or at Mackay Envelope Co., 2100 Elm St., Minneapolis, MN 55414.
