Is Anyone Listening?

I was watching television the other night, listening to Dan Rather report on the low unemployment rate (4.0%) in January 2000. He said that the downside of full employment was lousy service and angry customers. While I am sure Rather was generalizing, his comment certainly applies to companies in the computer industry. As companies become more "productive," utilizing outsourcing and automation as key parameters, these companies are losing the human element associated with end users.

I have always thought that an automated answering service starts a customer's dialogue with a company off on the wrong foot. Calling a company for service involves emotion, as well as facts, and emotion must be diffused as quickly as possible. If you call a company for customer service and the first contact you encounter is a human voice, you somehow feel that you're dealing with real people, even though this human might direct your call to a recorded instruction. At least you know that the company received your call and that a human works there.

When your call for service is answered by recorded instruction and the recorded instruction promptly places you on "hold," it gives you a sort of lost feeling. Particularly when you can't outwait the "hold" and you must hang up without ever having talked to a person. At this point, you realize that nobody within the company even knows you placed a call for service.

While writing this column, I placed a call to DLJ Direct for my wife. She wanted to open an online trading account. After being initially greeted by a machine and then proceeding through three successive menu options, a machine finally told me that all customer service representatives were busy. I hung up. I tried DLJ again 30 minutes later and got the same drill. We're talking "new customer" here, not a complaint. Unfortunately, automated phone systems can't tell the difference between a sale and a complaint.

My customer service suggestion is that companies should begin listening. The first point of contact a calling customer should have is with a real person. This real person should, of course, log the call and explain the routing direction, including any possibility of "holding." In addition, there should always be a return to the origin when the customer can no longer hold or is caught in some infinite, automated loop. This means companies will have to hire a lot more people to answer the telephone, but the cost can be charged to public relations.

By the way, my suggestion also applies to telephone companies, like AT&T. Have you ever been caught in their system?

Al Shugart is the founder of Al Shugart International (Soquel, CA), a startup resource company focused on helping entrepreneurs launch new enterprises and on growing small companies into big companies.