I design contact centers for a living. I have done so for almost a quarter century now, until very recently I only had worked for Fortune 200 companies (moved to the public sector which is a nice change of pace).
A quick bit of jargon definition: We refer to various means of communication as “channels”. A contact center is multi-channel if you can reach it by more than one channel (i.e. phone, SMS, chat, email, etc.). It is considered omni-channel if you can switch between these channels (supposedly seamlessly, but see below).
This article gets several points dead on and misses several more. Here is my professional take, make of it what you will.
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Call centers are expensive. Licensing and software costs are very high. There are few vendors who offer scalable omni-channel offerings and the licensing costs end up being exorbitant. And you need omni-channel contact centers because:
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Phones are the least efficient way to service customers. An agent can only be on the phone with a single customer at a time, but they can staff around 6 chat or email sessions simultaneously. For a customer, this devoted attention is a boon, but for a company it’s very costly because Agents, even poorly paid ones, are the most expensive part of your contact center if you are paying benefits, and if you aren’t you will not get good agents.
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Agent turnover is very high. Agents are poorly paid and their job sucks. They are driven by metrics that are poorly thought out, intended to drive efficiency but ultimately create poor behavior; the article gets this very correct. A lot of poor service you get is caused by agents trying to hit impossible metrics. Don’t blame the agent, the managers are the problem here.
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The technology has gotten better - and worse. VOIP infrastructure radically reshaped contact center design and the migration to CCaaS reshaped it again, with some good sides and a lot of bad sides. Telephone technology is an aging tech with a substantial demographic issue. I am consistently the youngest member of my teams and I have been doing this for almost 25 years. Expertise is aging out of the field and taking a lot of knowledge with them. Further, the number of disciplines you need for expertise has dramatically increased. It is no longer enough to just know CCNA-level networking, wiring, PSTN tech, linux and windows servers administration, codecs, basic related legal knowledge (wiretapping laws, Ray Baume’s Act, TEHO laws in India, etc.), design and infrastructure theory (like Poisson distribution), but now you also need to know Kubernetes, docker, ESXi (or equivalent), AWS, Azure, etc. It’s a lot and nobody can know it all, the complexity of modern design and no education program to get there means there’s just a lack of comprehensive understanding of the technology at a pretty fundamental level for most people trying to design and maintain this stuff. The result? A system designed around 99.999% uptime is now failing to meet that SLA, hell some vendors won’t even promise it anymore but most will just lie and claim that they do. So there are reliability issues.
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AI. This one hits pretty closet to home for me because of a personal experience so a quick anecdote: at one job, I had a spirited discussion with the head of our IVR technology group over how effective AI would be at reducing call volume into the center. He initially had great success, reducing call volume by ~30% in the 6 months. He received accolades and commendations, a big bonus, he was riding high and honestly he deserved to be. The problem, and what prompted my attempt to intervene, was his promise to continue that trend, predicting that his AI tech could reduce human-required calls by 60% within the next 2 years.
To me, this was madness. His initial success was because he moved the payment system into the IVR instead of having agents do it. This is a no-brainer. Computers are quite capable of taking payments or listing basic account information, but more complex tasks involve a much greater up-front cost in technology development and we didn’t have that budget, it was a massive over promise and I told everyone who I could to not take his estimation seriously. Unfortunately, he had a PhD and I am a college dropout, so they listened to him and cut 50% of their agent count via attrition. The results were predictably disastrous and the company hasn’t yet been able to fix it years later (thankfully, I left that place).
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I don’t think this is intentional per se. Having been in numerous meetings with leadership about contact center issues, I can say that they are just as upset by poor customer service as you are. There is no top-down effort to make your life suck. But line must go up and contact centers are always cost centers which means companies hate them, they don’t view customer service as integral to making money despite understanding that angry customers will leave them so there is a constant budget short-fall. The issue isn’t someone at the top thinking “If we treat our customer poorly enough they will stop calling and we’ll save money!” It’s just standard corrosive capitalism creating perverse incentives that make everything worse. It’s a systemic problem.
Anyway, that’s my view for whatever it’s worth. I am glad to be in the public sector now, which has its own issues, but at least everyone is focused on actually providing service because the service is the value.
Thanks for this perspective. I cringed so hard at the part about the guy with the PhD being listened to over you, because I know so many dumbasses with PhDs.
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I have to take an expensive medication (Humira) to be able to walk. If I don’t take it for long enough, I will be unable to work and therefore unable to afford the medication, and therefore unable to get back to work effectively. It’s illegal to discriminate for disabilities but it would legitimately make it very difficult to do my job with severe arthritis symptoms. CVS Specialty Pharmacy, in conjunction with CVS Caremark makes me spend 20+ hours a year on the phone getting this medication, overcharges me, and has intentionally built all of their systems to be as inefficient as possible, even when it doesn’t really benefit them to do so. One time I was pissed off enough about an issue that I looked up a list of executives and sent every permutation of all of their names @ cvs.com an email explaining my displeasure about this and with them as human beings who should be ashamed of themselves. It accomplished nothing except getting me in contact with an “executive care coordinator” who was just another useless customer service drone who wasn’t actually allowed to do anything to fix anything. I have been dealing with this for years at this point. I am not able to switch to another pharmacy or benefit manager due to how my employer’s insurance works, and realistically the only other alternative in this space if you work for a big company is United Healthcare, and they are apparently just as bad. I have tried to complain to my employer about the unacceptable state of their health insurance benefits and they don’t give a shit. I have contacted my government representatives. They don’t give a shit. I have done literally everything I can think of and nothing has changed, nothing will change, and I don’t think that in the current system that anything can change.
So yeah, when I saw what a particular beloved Mario brother did, I laughed my ass off and cracked open a beer when I got off work to celebrate. I am legitimately surprised it took so long for someone to lose it and do something drastic. Every time I have to deal with these fuckers I just think about how much angrier and more desperate I could be if my medical issues were worse or if it was my kid I was fighting for. It was inevitable that someone would be driven to violence, and unless something changes, it will happen again. I don’t really condone violence like this because I don’t think it’s good for society or for the person committing the violence, but when the system is designed in this way, these companies are effectively committing violence against all of us disguised as bureaucracy and hidden behind human shields of front line customer service staff. It is, therefore, completely understandable, and in my opinion, inevitable, that some people are going to respond with violence of their own when faced with such hopeless injustice. I’m just glad he got the right guy in this case and didn’t go off the deep end and decide to shoot up a call center or hospital.
It’s crazy to me that your health care is dictated by your company that you work for.
Companies are known to try make money not spend it.
I say this sitting in a hospital now at 1am with my wife cause she’s having very bad pains during pregnancy all for free, despite them saying we will likely have to drive 20kms to the next hospital because this one is underfunded and understaffed
Yeah God forbid we have socialized healthcare otherwise we’d have to put up with long wait times, barriers to accessing care, and a lack of choice in healthcare providers.we certainly don’t have any of that now.
Yeah what a horrible thing, everyone having access.
I think Australia’s system is reasonable. If you have money you can have private health and get seen faster etc and bypass the public system.
Unfortunately where I live its rural especially by American standards 260,000 people in my whole state (technically a territory <Northern Territory>) we have 3 cities two 20kms apart and the third 1500kms away with its own hospital there.
So it’s hard to service two hospitals so close to each other and tithe private maternity ward was just shut due to lack of income
Good article, but the bit about airline customers being only slightly less likely to use the airline they hate is hardly something you can blame on customers.
If the alternatives either don’t exist (e.g., United is the only feasible route between city A and City B), or they are both shitty (Delta is just as shitty as United, so the fact that United breaks guitars doesn’t mean I’m more likely to pick Delta), then poor customer service is just the cost of existing.
Same situation as price gouging, or Apple vs Google, Ford vs Chevy, or Samsung vs LG. Yeah, you have options, but none of them respect you. So you can not travel, not communicate, and not be entertained, or you can “voluntarily” participate in what society has become.
Wait, did people not know this is a common, intentional practice?
As common as claiming you’re chatting with a real support person that is actually a bot/llm, even though the first part of the bot told you it was transferring you to a ‘real person’, and the wait time was between 60 and 180 seconds?
I’ve always suspected this. Wild to see it in print as a strategy though. Infuriating position to be in and instantly erodes any sense of brand loyalty.
It is a business decision to have terrible customer service.
I would argue that it’s more a consequence of a whole series of poorly thought-out business decisions. Customer service is a cost center, meaning it doesn’t bring in revenue. So it’s one of those things that executives like to target for cost-cutting measures because any amount they can reduce spending there improves their overall bottom line. So we get things like:
- Outsourcing CS. Maybe in the US, but more likely overseas
- Reduced training
- Rules for call handlers that are meant to encourage solving problems quickly, but effectively punish them for providing good service when they are unable to do that.
When the only meaningful metric they look at is “how little can we spend?” the only logical conclusion is that service is going to suffer. The actual cost of poor customer service is a lot more difficult to pin down and measure.
Too many businesses grow and merge beyond their ability to support their customers. I say companies shouldn’t be allowed to merge unless their average time to connect callers to a live person is less than one minute.
What about states? Ever had to call unemployment? Lucky enough to be in a US state with paid leave? They are websites that make 1998 1.0 look decent. Their phone trees just dump you when you call them and say they are overloaded. No email, no ticket support online. So no web, phone or email support for those you are beholden to.
States aren’t trying to turn a profit, what is the incentive to have unemployment and paid leave broken in states that have passed them as law?odt of the states with paid leave tout them and promote how great they are but make the process a gauntlet of cirizen-hating obstacles.
Looking at you CA, OR and WA.
States aren’t trying to turn a profit,
Yeah they do? Or rather they still have a budget to balance and not paying social helps the balancing
I get the general sentiment, but there’s a huge difference between being profit-driven and caring about balancing a budget.
States are not trying to turn a profit.
It’s the same. Poor service is a choice they make
And the state doesn’t want you to not be a slave for more than a second.
Reason I don’t move to the US despite “the wages are better” #321. I never had to deal with this. If I was the person in the car, I would have just sent an email to Consumer Protection, and they would have dragged the dealer to arbitration. BTW arbitration here doesn’t mean “court-but-paid-by-the-company”, that’s illegal, it’s just that they try to cut through this exact bullshit without going to court and incurring fees. If the company representative does not show up, it’s grounds for a quick judgement against the company at court afterwards, and the authority also reviews if the company should even have a business licence if this keeps happening.
“the wages are better”
I had a USian tell me this here while on vacation. It took a moment for me to realize he was so deep in privilege that he was practically swimming in it not having to think about everything that’s happening in the US right now for some goddamn money.
Fun fact, swearing at the robots can get you shunted to a human being. Not every robot works this way though.
We have a list of phases in our chat bot that will cause the bot to flag the message.
You can let a human know. Or you can set up automation to disconnect the customer.
I won’t say what we do.
Poor customer support is the #1 thing that will get me to stop using a service/buying future products. Everybody fucks up, what matters most is what happens next. If they make the problem right with little hassle, why bother switching?
I recently had to deal with this shit from my mortgage handler. I wouldn’t do business with them if I could avoid it, but there’s nothing I can do. I have no say over who owns my debts.
They just wouldn’t endorse and return the check from insurance. No good reason for it, they just wouldn’t do it. They always needed more information.
Eventually I was just like look, the work has already been done for 6 months. My contractor is going to sue me if I don’t pay, and since you are the ones at fault for the delay, I’ll make sure you also get sued. I never consented to do business with you, and I wouldn’t. I do not trust any of you to be competent enough to do your jobs, and that’s pretty shit for such a big lender. This isn’t your house, and thus its structure and contents are none of your fucking business, the insurance check isn’t your money, thus you can’t hold it hostage for info that’s none of your fucking business, and if you don’t release it, well that’s on you, my contractor knows what’s going on.
Magically it only took a week after that to get it endorsed and returned. The sludge just somehow magically went away.
What did my mortgage company want that they were delaying so much? Information about my property that had nothing whatever to do with the insurance claim. Probably in the hopes that they could foreclose in the future. Because my house is worth a ton more than the debt they bough cost them.
This is also the company that wouldn’t allow me to refinance my mortgage to remove my co-signer and take out a bit extra to pay off debts… unless I wanted to take out more than the current value of the home (a loan I don’t remotely qualify for), and be upside down.
If you are in the US and are unfortunate enough to be stuck with freedom mortgage because your original lender sold you off to them, I’m sorry. If you are looking to get a mortgage, do your best to avoid them. Nothing you can ultimately do, though, as your consent to do business with them doesn’t matter and your only recourse is to refinance with another lender, or sell…
Insurance was it’s own little nightmare, and I’m also stuck there because my house is too old to be covered by most insurance providers (around 140 years old now; most insurance won’t cover anything beyond 100 yrs) and between the two things it was over a year from the storm until I paid my contractors for the work.
I also noticed there is something fucky going on at Freedom Mortgage. I asked them about the requirements for canceling my PMI. The guy on the phone said one thing, then I received an unrequested letter saying something else, then another unrequested letter completly contradicting everything prior, saying I can’t cancel PMI even if I pay down the principal to the PMI threshold, which I’m pretty sure isn’t how it works. I think they have AI running everything or something.
Literally all of my communications with them was over the phone, or previously with a lawyer (not my lawyer).
I didn’t think they were ai, but there’s a solid chance that determines their… output?
The lawyer thing was for a parcel transfer with my neighbor (new owner) to get rid of an easement neither of us wants but has been there since the 90s because that property is non-compliant (built directly on the property lines around half of my property). That was almost 3 years ago. They forced my neighbor to do all sorts of surveys and shit, cost him $20k. I said right at the start that I’m thrilled to do this, but nobody will ever set foot inside my house for it (the property lawyer assured me I would never need to allow someone into my house for this, as it’s nothing to do with the house. And that’s normal.)
Anyway at the end of the process they demanded a full appraisal of the property including access to the interior of my garage and house. Nope! You definitely don’t need that for a parcel swap that I gain land on…? That’s so invasive and felt like they just want to know if my house is worth the risk of illegal foreclosure. (My neighbor and I now have a verbal agreement that when I sell or pay off the mortgage, whichever comes first, the the land swap will be implemented as previously discussed)
And part of the shenanigans they pulled with the insurance thing was to start sending all my mail to that lawyer… 6 months into the insurance shit, and a full 3 years after I’d last talked to the lawyer (who, again, was not even my lawyer, the neighbor hired her). She just emailed me like “why am I getting your mortgage statements?” And then sent them a really nasty lawyer email saying basically “what the fuck are you people doing??”
They just pulled a random mailing address out of my file… after 12 years of only sending shit to the property address… sent my check to her, unsigned. Super glad I didn’t listen to them and send a check I endorsed (they probably would have cashed it, but I was adamant they wouldn’t be able to cash the check; I already didn’t trust them after that property swap thing. So I adamantly refused to send a partially endorsed check.)
Imho…? It’s weaponized incompetence, not ai.
Sorry for the wall of text, I’m still pretty salty about the whole thing.
No no, it’s great, thanks for sharing and sorry for your troubles. As I was reading your first comment I was getting freedom vibes and then, oh shit, you dropped their name. Yay! /s
The level of incompetence I’ve seen is peanuts compared to what you’ve been through. I looked up the specifics of PMI cancellation from the consumer financial protection bureau and the last letter they sent is simply wrong, while the second one was 99% correct. I think I’ll send them copies of the letters and ask for clarification just to be a hassel.
Again I keep thinking AI. In what way they’re using it, I don’t know, but the randomness of the responses I’ve received makes me think nobody is at the wheel. The one time I called, the person gave me inaccurate numbers for pmi cancellation, and he said had to wait for a calculator to spit out a value. Perhaps they are interacting with an AI that dictates their output.
I’m so glad it’s not just me thinking freedom mortgage is a fucked company. I mean the name alone says “we are here to fuck you”, just like every anti-democratic bill in the last 20 years being called “freedom peacekeeping against domestic terror” and it targets like gay people or smth.
Imho, give them hell. It’ll probably be a waste of time: they are super good at non-updates and shirking their responsibility…
But, you know, I’ve worked in call centers before and whenever anyone said anything about bringing in legal representation, our go-to was to escalate. I didn’t want to risk it with my mortgage company if I was empty-threating them, but when I had a viable threat of legal, boy did they jump.
So maybe for your instance, tell them you had a lawyer review the documents and found some inaccuracies between copies, and ask for a new copy to be sent to you, and maybe if you can spin up an alias that looks convincing, have them CC your “lawyer”.
It worked for me, and the call center I used to work for auto-escalated anything mentioning legal just as a default (people trained well handle well), so maybe that’s the ticket. But make it a credible threat. :)
Sounds very similar to something I went through. I went the fuck off after the 10th time of faxing the same crap. They finally did pay up, but it was lunacy how many hours on the phone it took.
I just got a new shipment of C4 energy with a damaged case and a missing case. I took some pictures, sent an email, then went to bed. I woke up to new product being shipped to me and a reply apologizing about something out of their control. Fast and easy customer service.
A little understood rule of retail is:
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Customer buys something, has neutral opinion.
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Product has a problem, customer has negative opinion.
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Company resolves problem well, customer now has positive opinion.
That’s a very important lesson for organisations to learn. A customer complaint is a golden advertising opportunity.
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Agreed my wife is a rep for a company. I will say I absolutely have never seen a company with such an amazing C. S department. Weeks of training, testing and practice before getting on the phones.
Then slowly integrating more calls and after about 6 weeks , the best reps I have ever seen
Then there’s Xfinity…
I have not purchased anything from cyber power for 20 years and pny for 15 years due to not handling their mistakes.
Before someone said that cyber power has new owners, well I’m still not buying from them.
There’s a timer that starts on your call to be done within, say, 20 minutes, and to get you the fuck off the phone. The employee is punished if you’re still on the line, so they have zero incentive to keep the call going. Click. Then who wants to call back to another phone tree to complain about… who was it again?
Protip: take copious notes, and if you are fortunate enough to live in a single-party consent state and are talking to someone who can get results, get a recording.
My state is single consent and I was recording a call with att once and the rep straight up tried to gaslight me. When I told her that I was recording this, so I can play back exactly what she said, she told me that she’s in California and didn’t give consent. I laughed and told her that since I’m not sitting in California I don’t really care about their laws at the moment.
Fun fact in all party consent states consent is obtained merely by notifying the other party that the call is being recorded.
It’s a really weird definition of consent
If you don’t consent you can just hang up, but that basically means the deal is “give consent or you get no support”.
Fun fact in all party consent states consent is obtained merely by notifying the other party that the call is being recorded
And almost all calls with a company will start with a line about ‘recording the call for quality purposes’. Well, both parties consented after that point, record away!
Continuation of the call past that point is just implied consent.
Just to note, if the line says the call may be recorded for quality control purposes - they gave consent.
Consent is a weird word in the context its used for private recordings. A better word for laypeople would be disclose or notice. In those states you just have to mention that you are recording.
The consent is not an active agreement to be recorded, but a passive consent by continuing the call after the notice is given.
“This call may be recorded” does mean you may record the call.
For training and service quality means they need our help training them to provide quality service
The law requires consent to record. Its not a contract or license to only use it for those things.
Yeah, in my experience they’re underpaid and cop abuse all day. There’s a lot of tears, sick days, and anxiety in customer support, all of it young, much of it abusing substances to get through the day.
The kids aren’t paid anywhere near enough to deal with your attitude, nor should they be expected to. They aren’t the business; they’re the poor sods that have to work for them.
So? I know it sounds harsh but that’s not my fault- it’s their employer’s. The only way I have to interact with these companies is through their front line staff so I am not going to back down and accept shitty conditions just because these guys are also victims. I have started to view them as conscripts on the opposing side of a war, who have done nothing wrong to me in particular but have been pitted against me by forces beyond either of our control. “Oh we shouldn’t shoot the German soldiers because they’re draftees just like us and it’s really Hitler we’re mad at.” Well guess what? Those guys are between us and Hitler qnd they’re following his orders to shoot at us so unfortunately they are our enemies too regardless of their own personal culpability. What do you think we’re supposed to do when dealing with customer service? Just give up and drive an unsafe car? In my case, I have to spend at least 20 hours a year on the phone with CVS customer for the privilege of getting my medication that allows me to walk, should I just give up and say “Oh bother! This customer service rep is so nice and even though they hung up on me when I was trying to get my vital medication, it’s not really their fault!” Fuck that. If they want to be mad, let them be mad at their bosses. I am not going to stop fighting for my rights through the only means given to me just because these fuckers are using human shields to hide behind.
Yup. I’ve worked for a good company that did tech support, and if anyone was abusive, we immediately put them on hold and transferred them to a manager. Later, that person’s boss got a call from the manager about how their employee treated our employee. This rarely happened, fortunately. Most of our clients liked us, and most of us liked them.
And still to this day, when I need to call support, even if I’m pissed off, I don’t take it out on them. I just let them know I’m frustrated, and almost every time, they get me what I need.
Yeah speaking as a former customer service rep, it’s a fucking AWFUL job and unless you show proficiency in some other business area and catch someone’s a attention, you basically have no real opportunities except to take the ever increasing abuse and restrictions.
We are living in the state of Fuck it.
pretty much sums it all up right there.
