Not all our employees were willing to go the second mile for a customer if it kept them from getting in a few extra games of Minesweeper. But a lot were.
Actually, you can play a lot of Minesweeper when you're in queue with a big, impersonal company trying to get help for a customer. But as a department, we tended to make fun of our fellow employees who were too lazy to solve their customers' problems. And I can't count the times that our call center reps ran to my desk with sincere concern for the problems of the caller they had on hold.
One little rep was known for repeatedly gasping, "The customer can't make calls!" Being a technical person, I wanted to know why. Were they being pinned down by thugs? Had they failed to pay their bill? What happens when they try to call out?
"Nothing," she replied firmly. "Nothing happens. They just can't make any calls." Usually I could get her to find out what was really going on, and to verify the absence of thugs and shiftlessness. But I appreciated her sense of urgency.
I hear that Wachovia Bank is getting senior employees to personally call dissatisfied customers.
With us, it's not Minesweeper. There's an Excel version of Tetris going around. I really hate to see that in my screen captures.
And Wachovia is on the right track. It's good to see a call center that makes their senior management make callbacks to customers. The management cannot say that they did not know what was going on.
Posted by: Ann Onimous | July 20, 2007 1:52 PM | Permalink to Comment