Thursday, February 03, 2011

What's Happened to Customer Care Part 2

Last week I blogged (ranted) about Customer Care and how we don't know what has happened to it. That was the Customer Care we receive when dealing face to face with small local businesses like the green grocers et al.

But what about Customer Care on the telephone? Mostly, we experience this through Big Business; your mobile phone service provider; your land line phone service provider (this one could be Big Trouble, if you get my drift); your utilities provider; your bank/building Society and any other financial institution like your car insurance company or your pensions firm. And of course government organisations like the people you pay your Council Tax to - not forgetting Revenue and Customs.
Dealing with complex  'Call Centres'
has  become a huge frustration
for  most customers these days

Have you ever tried getting through to your mobile phone service provider? The first thing you notice is that nobody but nobody wants to speak directly with you. There are recorded voices all over the Big Business industry to stop you speaking to real people. I ask you, is that Customer Care? "Welcome to blah, blah, blah company. If you're calling about blah, press 1; if you're calling about blah press 2. And so it goes on. You can spend 30 minutes or more just pressing buttons or listening to music to kill yourself by and nobody gives a monkey's. To add insult to injury, the system tells you that your call is being recorded for security and training purposes, which means that if you stuff up in any way they have a record of it to be used against you later. Is this Customer Care? Not likely.

Why is Customer Care so poor, these days? Well you will have your own ideas but I feel that a partial answer is the creation of Call Centres. They are the bane of our lives. At their inception, training companies were falling over themselves to write courses for Call Centre Training; most, if not all of those courses have ended up on the shelf because it doesn't take long to train people on which buttons and icons to click on and to say "I'm sorry, the system won't allow me to do that". Luckily for me, I decided early on that I would have nothing to do with these latter-day sweat shops.

Well Big Business require a BIG rant, so see you next time for some of the rest!

No comments: