Why Your Call Center is Only Getting Noisier (mckinsey.com) 105
From a report by research firm McKinsey & Company: Organizations have been investing in all manner of customer-facing technology solutions to replace live calls. Of all operational call-center technologies, digital solutions were ranked as one of the most important over the next five years by four out of five executives. Only agent desktop tools ranked higher. These technologies begin with websites, chat bots, and apps and extend to artificial-intelligence robots that simulate human conversations -- redefining the way organizations interact with customers -- as well as more tried-and-tested functionalities such as improved web, app, or self-service capabilities in interactive voice-response (IVR) systems. And yet, despite this plethora of technology solutions, we see that calls are not going away and instead are catching call-center executives off guard in their efforts to reduce volumes. It's not that a spike in call volumes is necessarily a bad thing. On the contrary, the proliferation of digital tools can awaken previously dormant customers, sparking new inquiries from an engaged customer base. But in many instances, we've also observed that the volumes of unwanted calls exceed what would be expected during a learning period, or remain constant or rise over time, defeating strategic goals and leaving managers bewildered and unable to tie tech investments to improved operational outcomes. Why are so many organizations struggling with reaping the full benefits from these investments? In our experience, the answer often lies in two core areas. First, as companies turn to technology to address call-center volumes, they allow customer experience to take a back seat to digital technology in their operations, creating dissonance in direct customer interaction, where the objective is harmony and efficiency. Second, by counting on technology to solve their call-center issues, executives lose focus on core operations and upset the balance between human interaction and automation in an era of evolved customer service.
My IQ dropped 10 points after that summary (Score:5, Insightful)
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The issue is McKinsey & Company needs more page hits for this neurotoxin.
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Then call Brain Support and ask them why. Oh wait, they are swamped, nevermind.
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Re:My IQ dropped 10 points after that summary (Score:5, Informative)
The title of the article is about volume as in sound volume or noise. The content is about call center volume as in the amount of people calling in.
The stupid...it hurts.
Re: My IQ dropped 10 points after that summary (Score:1)
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I thought I hated he button thing...but man, having to talk/shout to a computer voice to get through a menu system?
not only frustrating, but you're having to do it within earshot of people around you, at least with pushing buttons, it is private that you are doing something su
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For me it's the "You can find more information on our website at...".
If your website was worth a damn I wouldn't be waiting in a fucking queue to speak to you!
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I think the only thing I may hate worse than the sing song indian accents that are barely understandable...is the voice robot that answers phones these days, asking that you speak answers to them, rather than simply pushing a button.
I thought I hated he button thing...but man, having to talk/shout to a computer voice to get through a menu system?
Right... I may quite likely be calling from work - the people next to me don't want to hear me shouting down the phone, and the keypad is quicker.
Plus, VAMs aren't always accurate : "Did you say you want to schedule a testicle removal?"
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I pay about ten percent more for house and car insurance because no automation, you call them and a reception answers with a regular everyday accent, finds out what you need and puts you right through to exactly the person, in the right department, you actually need to speak to. Considering how much extra it costs versus the time saving on my end (waiting on hold, spending a whole bunch of time keying through shit automation systems and finally one wrong press, wrong person and start again). I am older and
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You are clone #571,284,321 spawned just last Tuesday. We downloaded a mix of the memories from clones #71,230,128 and #13,100,571 to give you a "unique" identity. Your sole purpose is to serve in the call center. Do not dwell anymore on your identity or it will make you dysfunctional and then we will have to reboot your existence.
Re: My IQ dropped 10 points after that summary (Score:2)
WTF (Score:2)
Seriously... WTF is this. More slashvertising?
More /. greying (Score:2)
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It's the low level minions who get spit up and chewed out in favor of H1Bs.
Doesn't matter how good you are. When you hit 40 you're either going to live in management or be outsourced to younger 'more capable' H1Bs.
Failing to understand that perception is reality in the corporate world tells me you are posting from an imaginary idea of the workplace that's hiring the H1Bs.
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It's not very good slashvertising. No one reads the fucking articles. I only looked at the link when I tried to figure how this was slashvertising.
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It solves one thing: It makes the customer go away.
This is a primary goal for many businesses - provide the facade of providing customer service, while actually telling them to go frak themselves.
Re:Do ppl really use this shit?? (Score:5, Funny)
The best customers are the ones who never call.
Why bother keeping your worst customers?
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It will certainly make me go away. I tend to give my money to places that have better customer service, when possible.
I almost always buy RAM from Mushkin. Back when they sold direct, they actually had a real live person answer their phone. On top of that, they were very easy to understand, and actually knew what they were talking about. Even if/when they were the more expensive option, they always got my money.
If my choice is to pay a little more for a product from a business that has pleasant people w
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That's true. And as a customer, I take that to heart. If the business can't be bothered to provide reasonable customer support, and just wants me to go away, I will -- to a competitor.
I've stuck with some vendors simply because when I call their tech support, a knowledgeable, articulate human being answers. And I've dropped vendors who make it unreasonably difficult to talk to a knowledgeable support person when necessary. If only upper management wouldn't continue to trap us in long term contracts with
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I've yet to encounter a trouble-shooting AI bot. Can anyone recommend a registration-free instance so I can kick the tires? Preferably, a reasonably good one, if that's even possible.
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I meant an online product support chat-bot, not a physical bot like R2D2.
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This sounds like a failure of the vendor's system; I've used dozens of support systems with various Android phones and never had that issue.
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That's good because chat bots aren't there to solve your problem either.
They're all there to make you go away; you gave them your money, and they want to keep as much as possible. That's only possible if you piss off.
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Don't worry, their live human won't be able to help you either, as they're really just reading off a script at this point with no ability to deviate from it.
If you're lucky, the 3rd or 4th tier above them will be able to actually deviate from the script and provide actual support. You know, the kind you used to get from the first person who answered the phone.
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Yeah. First you get customer service, then support help level 1 and then they transfer you to level 2 whose calls are routed to what I firmly believe is the level 1 guys again but with the hope that the next level 1 guy is a bit more knowledgeable through outside skills. Then you get told it will cost you 100 to send someone out to your house as they no longer have level 3 help. At this point, I have usually found the answer via google or one of those youtube videos (which I used to swear against but now
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I used to work on an ISP help desk many, many years ago. If you asked to escalate to a manager or a higher level of support we would quite literally put you on hold, look around the room and ask our co-workers who felt like being a "manager" today, we'd then transfer the person to our co-worker who was at the same level as we were.
Of course this was back in a time when we didn't work off scripts, and were hired for our extensive knowledge of the systems and software we were supporting. If we couldn't figure
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We do the same once they reach a high enough level where I work.
It's pretty much if there is nothing we can do, then there really is nothing we can do.
The problem is that so many companies put people that are not empowered on the front lines that customers expect to be able to hear a yes after being told no if they climb high enough. If there weren't so many fake no's being told, this wouldn't happen but I imagine it does weed out probably 8-90 percent of complainers.
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Thing is. This wasn't "high enough level" this was the front line. We were the first, last, and only level of support.
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Hello? My broom just broke after a dozen sweeps.
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
call center - lazy gits (Score:4, Insightful)
ISP jerked me around for weeks reseting my modem which showed noisy / lossy line. Then they made me drive to an office of theirs to switch modems, new modem had same problem as old modem of course. Finally I posted on newly created twitter account with just the right hashtag to put my tweet in stream with their marketing spew, and presto, tech came and ran a new line (old one chewed up by squirrels) within 48 hours.
So now you know what to do.....
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ISP jerked me around for weeks reseting my modem which showed noisy / lossy line. Then they made me drive to an office of theirs to switch modems, new modem had same problem as old modem of course. Finally I posted on newly created twitter account with just the right hashtag to put my tweet in stream with their marketing spew, and presto, tech came and ran a new line (old one chewed up by squirrels) within 48 hours.
So now you know what to do.....
Kill the squirrels?
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Kill the wabit
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It's duck season!
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illegal where I live. and squirrels are cute. ISPs are not cute, and legal to "hunt" their reputation on social media
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They should make wiring taste like skunks, then critters wouldn't munch it.
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Having previously worked in a few call centers prior to starting my career, I would say there is a lot of variation on how lazy the individual on the opposite end of the line actually is.
There are two classes of call centers: in-house and third-party. The former is usually found in higher tier technical support, relatively new companies, or after a "customer service" focus revamp. The latter is pretty much for any other tier or time. In-house technical support usually has slightly more ability to help (exce
Here's an idea (Score:5, Insightful)
One can use Microsoft as a prime example of the hoops one has to jump through to find a simple solution. If the question is, "How do I add a mailbox to Outlook?", the page should not start with:
A shared mailbox can be a practical solution for any business with groups of people working from different locations. With the right permissions, any person in a group can access a shared mailbox that appears in their address book. The shared mailbox is automatically available in the Folder pane in Outlook. (taken directly from the Microsoft page [office.com])
No one cares about a "practical solution". They want to know how to add a mailbox to Outlook. Nor do they care about why one should use a shared mailbox. They asked how to add a mailbox. In fact, nowhere on the page does it tell you how to add a mailbox. It does everything but that.
If you want your call center volume to go down, provide useful information, information which is not buried ten menus deep or stuck in some corner with an obscure name.
You know why people keep calling you? Because your information pages technology sucks. That's why.
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How is the OP a liar? Their question was how to add a mailbox to Outlook. There was no need to go into why one should use shared mailboxes, or the benefits of a shared mailbox.
Also, one can add a mailbox to Outlook without needing to be an admin. Yes, the admin has to create the mailbox, but one can then add it to Outlook on their own with the proper steps. Which the article does not describe.
So no, the OP was spot on.
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He linked to a page about adding a SHARED mailbox, which is something only admins can do, then claimed that page DOESN'T answer the question when it in fact does.
So no, the OP was not "spot on".
Further, if you Bing "How do I add a mailbox to Outlook?" you get the following right in front of your face. It's actual content on the top of the results page, not a regular search result, extracted from their support forum (see the poor grammar):
How Add mailbox to Outlook?
On the File m
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That's one reason out of many.
Here's why people call, in a nutshell:
- It's less of a hassle to call and be helped by a human person than dig through umpteen web pages, each giving you a different solution which doesn't work.
- Cultural reasons: when even your batch of toilet paper has a helpdesk toll-free phone number, you become educated to call every time you have an issue.
- Laziness: calling helpdesk makes someone else do the work for you in fixing whatever problem you have.
- Focus: you're less likely to
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It's very simple to create an alias to your existing outlook account. Don't ask me how, I did it yesterday and my memory doesn't reach that far. Perhaps a search for 'alias' in conjunction with 'outlook'. But there's more:
If your old email was xxx@outlook.com, and you create an alias called yyy@outlook.com, you can also make yyy your primary email address. All your MS account info remains the same- still only one password to deal with.
You may think I'm clever to have discovered this, but I'm not clever enou
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Article Summary (Score:2)
I read that painfully bloated article, and it is very simple.
Either are buying tech to solve the wrong problems, or they are not updating processes across the enterprise when new tech is deployed.
This is not news. People have been doing this before I entered the workforce, and they will probably continue to do it long after I am dust.
And then there is this gem:
"It is no surprise, then, that more than 60 percent of customer-care leaders we surveyed are skeptical about eliminating inbound voice calls in the n
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At first it felt like by being annoying to their customers calling in, the customers would give up calling in and deal with suffering. Sounds like people are fed up to the max and are calling in more because of more problems.
It all comes back to poor service. If you provide a great service, you get less calls. If your provide a bad service, you get more calls. If your call-in number provides even worse service, you get even more calls because nothing gets resolved.
HELLO COMPANIES OF THE WORLD, provide good
Confused editor? (Score:1)
Headline: Why Your Call Center is Only Getting Noisier
Summary: It's not that a spike in call volumes is necessarily a bad thing. On the contrary, the proliferation of digital tools can awaken previously dormant customers, sparking new inquiries from an engaged customer base. ... [I]n many instances, we've also observed that the volumes of unwanted calls exceed what would be expected during a learning period, or remain constant or rise over time...
msmash, you _do_ know that there are _three_ definitions for
Simple (Score:4, Insightful)
Thanks to those modern cost saving measures, most now know to try solving the problem themselves first, with web searches and trial by error. As a result, by the time they call, they are desperate and no automated chatbot or menu will help them. In fact they increase frustration because the goal at that point is to talk to a more knowledgeable human.
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B...b...b...buzzwords! (Score:3)
Noises. (Score:2)
I thought this was about background sounds from call center calls. :/
I know why call centers are noisier (Score:2)
I cut my teeth doing ISP support for the ricochet wireless modem in the 90's, and I saw first hand how support was regarded by the C level execs.
We all started out with normal, 10x10 cubicles. Then they wanted to pack more people into the space, so they reduced us to 2 per cube. Then they wanted to reduce that even further, and put us all in individual wall stations that were about 1' deep by 2' wide. After that job, I started seeing this become the norm for most support departments.
So in short, they incr
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(I apologise if this comes off as a slashvertisment - I don't work for Google, and I'm only just starting out as a customer of theirs, so I've yet to see how good/bad they really are)
I had a chat with some Google folk about their cloud services. They told me that to them, the need for a support call was a 'bug'. They want to keep support as expensive for them as possible so that they're motivated to avoid it. They only staff with pretty senior people, and of course those people are able to (programatically)
English Please! (Score:2)
Was that summary even in English? EXAMPLE:
The example clause has absolutely no actual meaning. None, whatsoever.
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Was his name BeauHD or EditorDavid?