Talking About Your Business: The Call Center: Customer Service Where Nobody Wins

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March 29, 2008

The Call Center: Customer Service Where Nobody Wins

Have you ever worked in a call center? I have...and it's a great experience to LEAVE. I have really enjoyed the blogging of AC in Call Center Purgatory, http://callcenterpurgatory.blogspot.com/ and it reminded me of my call center experiences...and how lucky I was to get out too!

Doing some research on the history of call centers, I found this "Criticisms of Call Centers" information in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_centre

Criticisms of call centers generally follow a number of common themes:

From Callers:

operators working from a script.
non-expert operators (call screening).
incompetent or untrained operators incapable of processing customers' requests effectively.
overseas location, with language and accent problems.
automated queuing systems. This sometimes results in excessively long hold times
complaints that departments of companies do not engage in communication with one another.
deceit over location of call center (such as allocating overseas workers false English names)

From Staff:

close scrutiny by management (e.g. frequent random call monitoring).
low compensation (pay and bonuses).
restrictive working practices (some operators are required to follow a pre-written script).
high stress: a common problem associated with front-end jobs where employees deal directly with customers.
repetitive job task.
poor working conditions (e.g. poor facilities, poor maintenance and cleaning, cramped working conditions, management interference, lack of privacy and noisy).
impaired vision and hearing problems

Customers will tell you they don't like dealing with call centers. Employees like AC will tell you that they "hate" working in call centers. So why do they exist? The answer my friends is purely "financial". When I was hired by a Customer Service Outsourcing firm, Teletech, as a Training Supervisor for their UPS call center project in Tampa. UPS (the most bottom-line driven company I know of) saw all the financial benefits of closing their local calling centers and partnering with a company to do their customer service. It looked like a brilliant move at the right time to the company's leaders.

It was a disaster. The call centers opened with pomp and ceremony and the UPS employees back in their local delivery and processing centers fought us every step of the way. My employees would follow UPS protocol, only to find the local level UPS managers sabotaging their decisions, and the partnership at every turn. This was a classic case of 'us and them". Within two years, the local managers had won. The UPS call centers became nothing more than message centers. Our employees had all of their em"power"ment to fix a customer's problems taken away. Even worse, our call center employees simply became punching bags for the unhappy customers. Customers quickly figured out the call centers lack of empowerment, demanding to speak directly with someone who could actually do something for them besides "take another damn message".

Our customers did get clever...coming up with acronyms for UPS's customer service. Two of my favorites were: UPS = U People Said and UPS = Utterly Poor Service.

3 Years into the UPS partnership...the damage to our call center had been done. All the symptoms of misery were visible and measurable:

120% annual turnover rate

Terrible morale and attitudes

Employees burning out in 6 months

Shrinking labor pool -- would you want to work there?

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Coming to work was a horrible way to earn a paycheck for many of the employees. And it was horrible for our UPS customer's. And all of us in management were in a constant state of reactive chaos.

Bottom line: Call centers continue to struggle. Customers are frustrated and unhappy. Employees are miserable, turnover rates are growing to nearly "McDonald's like" numbers.

I know what we can do!!! Let's ship our call center jobs overseas...to...uh...I know...India! Lower costs to the company! Yes..that's the answer. Close those U.S. call centers...they're too expensive, anyway.

Can you say...customer service disaster? I can...and I will. An article in Time magazine reports that the call centers in India are facing grave shortages of employees. Why? Let's just say the call center honeymoon is over. http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1671982,00.html Yes, even employees in developing countries can figure out an awful place to work when they see one.

"Young people say it is no longer worthwhile going through sleepless nights serving customers halfway around the world. They have better job opportunities in other fields. The work is tiring and stressful and offers few career advancement opportunities, says Dr. A. Sankara Reddy, head of Sri Venkateswara College in New Delhi. In response to students' complaints, Reddy said the college a few months ago banned call center recruiters from campus. At least a handful of other local colleges over the last few years have made the same decision."

So...I guess the next step for companies is to find a better customer service tool than a call center. Wait! I've got it!!!! Let's try on-line customer service. That way that can't even call us! Let's take away the human contact and call ourselves "Problem Solving Representatives". I'll save my thoughts on this customer service disaster (and my latest round of frustrating customer service by e-mail with Amazon.com) for a future blog.

Andrew

Posted at 07:16 AM | Permalink

Comments

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When I saw this blog this morning, my gut was telling me tons to say. I decided, in my best interest to take a break, and breathe deep. I have very definite opinions of call centers, as I deal with them on a daily basis in my business. They are obviously the necessary evil. Out of my 45 hour work week, I spend maybe 5-6 hours either holding for call centers to answer, or working through the maze of menus. Before I go any further, I should say I have nothing personal against the poor people that must man the centers. That’s there job, and most do a decent job at it.

So, after a day of taking deep breaths, an MRI, shopping, and playing with my family, here are my more rational conclusions:

I work in the medical field as the manager of a billing company. Being on the phone collecting money is our job. Insurance companies are famous for long drawn out menus determining with whom you need to converse. Rarely do you get the correct department on the first time, and you are almost always transferred back to the menu and into another que before you can utter “wait”! Then by some miracle you get to the right department, only to get someone who has no knowledge of their business. There’s my issue.

If companies would train their staff to be able to answer any question posed by the person on the other end of the phone, I would be fine with them. One insurance carrier I have dealt with in the past, was famous for giving excuse number 12 (or whatever) why a claim wasn’t paid. We often asked can you give the next excuse, because I was given excuse number 12 last week, and that excuse doesn’t work this time. I could almost always make my notes before I was ever given an answer, because I knew what to expect. This is exactly why I don’t feel scripts work. 10+ years of them, and I could recite them all.

Outsourcing is another hot issue in my office. I can understand the financial necessity of outsourcing. Even the MRI I had this morning will be read by someone, hopefully a doctor, based in India. This is a common practice in the radiology field, Medicine by the internet...I won’t even comment on how I feel about that.

One very large, major insurance carrier in the US, outsources about 60% of the provider representatives to overseas. I have talked with many reps in India, where there is an entire city that was developed to be call centers for American companies. The reps are given Americanized names, and taught phonetically how to speak English. They do not understand the complicated world of medical coding, because they are not taught what it means, they read a script. They do not understand the medical benefits of policies and how the patient’s benefits work, because they aren’t taught. Mostly because today they are working with insurance company A, tomorrow they are taking orders for a mail order catalog.

If companies, not only insurance, but all companies, want to use call centers, that’s fine with me…but they need to make it user friendly, they need to teach their employees their business, and they need to empower them to be able to do something, anything, to make the customer happy, not just give lip service.

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