If you've ever looked at your dog and thought, wow, your life is great, what I would give for my life to be that easy. Well, I believe we can learn from dogs, and I'm writing a blog, with my dog Daisy, to teach people how to make life that easy.
Actually I started this blog to sell my e-books Jackpot and The Band, but that has now turned into a side gig.
Post for post Daisy and I are tackling life's challenges and world problems.
This is Discussions With My Dog.
Unsurprisingly getting through to somebody who could assist me was a long and torturous process. So long, that we had to cut Daisy’s walk short.
I explained to Daisy that this was all because of state-of-the-art customer service. I don’t blame the people who work in call centres – it’s the idiot management who design the systems.
Daisy was a bit miffed and expressed her dissatisfaction about the call centre administrator in the most vindictive way a dog knows how, by wishing ‘their arsehole become infested with the fleas of a thousand camels’. (Think about this happening if you were a dog!)
This got us thinking about the type of character who is responsible for running a call centre. Their game plan is to make life as awkward as possible for the customer, but in insidious ways, under the guise of delivering great customer satisfaction. This guys manager sees that the calls to the centre are reducing - which can only mean that their service is excellent -because we’re getting less complaints. Double bubble, we don’t need to employ so many call-centre staff. The call centre manager thinks ‘RESULT’, but it’s a good thing my manager is an even bigger dick than me.
Here is a 10 point plan on how to run a really effective call centre;
1. Carefully select the ‘on hold’ music to play whilst customers are waiting. Go for something ridiculously cheerful, but really irritating when it’s played on a loop.
2. Interrupt the ‘on hold’ music with a message about “how important your call is to us”.
3. Interrupt the ‘on hold music’ with another message “We are experiencing a high levell of calls at moment” – it’s the customers fault we’re too busy.
4. The first line of defence is always an automated message. Insist the customers provides lots of information to identify themselves. To be honest – would you ever make a call to a call centre pretending to be someone else?
5. The robot should then give the caller a list of options to press – so “you can deal with their call more efficiently”. At least six or seven options are good – by about number 6 the customer can’t remember what 1 or 2 were.
6. For an added challenge the automated messages can be on a continuous loop. Only the most persistent callers will work out how to get through the maze of automated questions.
7. When the customer is finally connected to an actual person, ask all the same identity questions that the robot asked – because “you value their privacy”.
8. Employ staff from all over the world, especially ones with pronounced accents. Customers love to guess where your call centre is actually based.
9. For difficult enquiries the customer adviser should redirect the call to the technical team. The customer knows there is a 50/50 chance their call will get disconnected. The customer service adviser has no idea that you don’t have a technical team and the call is directed into deep space. In a million light years alien civilisations will intercept all these calls.
10. If the customer advisor has been of no practical help, he/she should always tell the customer to “have a great day” in a happy smiley voice.
10. If the customer advisor has been of no practical help, he/she should always tell the customer to “have a great day” in a happy smiley voice.
Alastair and Daisy
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