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Call centers: Putting customer service on hold

(CBS News) The sort of music they play when your call gets put on HOLD seems like their way of saying: YOUR CALL IS NOT IMPORTANT TO US. Our Cover Story is reported by Martha Teichner:

At 79, with her heart condition, Mona Shaw doesn't seem like the violent type. She and her husband, Don, live near Manassas, Va., and rescue old or disabled dogs.

Comcast had screwed up their phone service. They just wanted it back.

"We had been down there, we had been down to the office and asked to speak to a manager or a supervisor," she said. "They put us out on a bench in the hallway, said 'We'll get him for you. Two hours later, they walked out and said, 'oh, he went home.'"

That was a Friday in August 2007. By Monday afternoon, after a week without a phone, Mona Shaw was mad.

"And then I thought, 'Okay, let's see . . . a hammer,'" she recalled.

"So I walked in, passed a whole bunch of people standing in line and leaned over the counter and started smashing the bits out of their computer and telephone," she laughed. "One woman got up and ran. She just took off running.

"And I said, 'Have I got your attention now?'"

Admit it: When you're on hold, in customer service hell, and the robotic voice tells you, The average wait time is . . . eighty . . . nine . . . minutes, deep down, wouldn't you like to get out a hammer, too?

"When we call, what we want is 'yes,' that's it," said Emily Yellin, the author of "Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us," a cold, hard look at customer service in the United States.

"I go and talk all over the country about this now, and every audience I ever go to, I ask them, 'Who in here has never had a bad experience with customer service?'" Yellin said. "No one has ever raised their hand."

Yellin cites a 2007 study showing that American call centers receive 43 billion calls a year.

Based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data, she estimates that 3 million people work in call centers in the United States, another 2 million in centers around the globe.

The NBC sitcom "Outsourced" sums up our stereotype of customer service: "Yesterday we out-sourced the entire call center to India!"

The call center industry didn't even exist until AT&T introduced its toll-free 800-numbers in 1967.

"The most striking thing is how much it costs to have a live American agent answer a call," Yellin said. "A live agent is about $7.50 per call. To outsource to a foreign country is about $2.35 a call. To use one of those voice response systems, the 'press one for this, the press two for that,' it's about 35 cents a call. A lot of companies saved a whole lot of money, and everybody was happy - except the customer.

Full Tilts Downfall Was Their Customer Service?

When Black Friday happened, I had money in Stars & Tilt, I left the money in Stars and panic withdrew from Full Tilt. It was a gut reaction from years and years of experience with them, which was it seems a good move on my part. I had no previous evidence to suggest they were in financial straits, no rumours anything dodgy was happening, no inkling they were doing anything illegal - it was purely down to their customer service. In my opinion, FTP were as big as they were because of their software, and nothing else, I had money in there because of the software. I loved the software, they had some really interesting games, most notably Rush Poker, but beyond that they were awful. Getting a reply to an email was a rarity, and when you did, it was usually a cut & paste job that didn’t come close to answering your question. Contrast that with Pokerstars, who not only have the best customer service in poker, they are up there with some of the best customer service I have seen full stop. At the heart of this was clarity, they kept us in the loop, even during Black Friday, questions are rarely left unanswered. You didn’t get that with FTP before Black Friday, you certainly don’t get that now. So I withdrew my money from Full Tilt Poker on a hunch based purely on customer service, which I think is a decent barometer for these things. If you cannot show an ounce of respect to the people who are paying for you to exist, if you are not doing everything in your power to keep them happy and playing on your site, then what other crucial elements of your business are you neglecting? We live in a world of extremely savvy consumers, the internet and social media has levelled the playing field and you can’t pull the wool over people’s eyes any more. Going forward I don’t think I am ever going to invest a significant amount of my time or money in any entity that doesn’t hold transparency and customer service in the highest of regards.

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