Last week, I had the most unfortunate experience with my internet service provider. I placed a call to customer care intending to change my wifi password. After 30 minutes of holding, listening to bad music and automated advertising, a technician finally picked up the call.
He helped me change the password, but after about 20 minutes on the call, I could not reconnect to the wifi despite several attempts. That’s when he told me to restart my computer and call back if I was still having issues. He got off the phone, fully aware that I was having issues reconnecting. Eventually I plugged into the LAN, Googled the issue, and was reconnected to wifi in less than 10 minutes after making a simple change to my laptop settings.
Here’s the thing with call centres which many customers don’t know: they don’t want to be on the phone with you for very long. Many call centres use a complex incentive system that supposedly encourages productivity among employees. Under this system, employees qualify for bonuses depending on factors such as the number of calls taken within a shift, and average time spent on these calls, often with very little attention is paid to whether the customer’s complaint was actually resolved.
Obviously if the CSR spends more time with you on a call, it will affect his call volume at the end of the shift. And even if the CSR would want to stay and resolve the issue, there is likely a supervisor standing in the background urging him to wrap it up. So how does one deal with this glaring failing in customer care?
First, recognize that the CSR has very little wiggle room when it comes to the company’s guidelines for customer interactions. Two, there is always the possibility that the CSR is new to the job. This call might be a learning opportunity for him/her which will be useful on future calls. Three, recognize that the CSR does not know everything. In an ideal world, we would get all our problems solved on the first call, every time. But this is the real world.
Four, take it in strides. The fact that your issue was not resolved could also be an opportunity for you to learn something new. I now know something about my computer that I didn’t know before, and that’s one less reason for me to call customer care.