I have been fed up with customer support for ages, just like many other people. I am amazed by the amount of companies that claim to have the best call centers, but when you call them they are just as sad as any others. I have been thinking for a while about what can be done and I have come up with 8 free and fairly commonsense ideas that will make any call center a lot better. Here they are in no particular order.

1. Tell the Truth (a.k.a. Don’t Lie)Although I just said no particular order, I do think this is probably the most important one. I have been lied to so often for numerous reasons. The most obvious one, and maybe the hardest to prove, is when the operator knows if something is in stock or not but lies about it for the sake of the sale/repair. The same problem relates to repair or delivery times: don’t lie if you know it will take 3 weeks, because sometimes people rely on these kind of facts.

This issue relates to planning on the customer side, and that brings me to the next point.

2. Keep me Informed

If you tell me something will take 1 week, and you know it is going to take more time after a few days, than tell me as soon as you know. Most customer support will only inform you after the promised period passes, which gets the customers angry.

We, the customers, are counting on certain promises and if we know a promise can’t be kept, we need to find a new solution as soon as possible. The earlier you tell us, the sooner we can respond. I actually won’t get angry about this kind of honesty, as it gives me time to prepare and make arrangements. Keeping me out of the loop just pisses me of.

3. Tell the Whole Truth

This point is a bit of a double, as it kind of touches the surface of tips #1 and #2, as with keeping me informed and telling the truth comes the responsibility to tell me everything. It won’t be the first time that an operator insures me in an informal way that everything will be OK, only to be told the complete opposite a few days later when I talk to a different operator.

In other words, don’t obscure the truth with weak promises and mumbo jumbo talk if you know better. It again comes down to us, the customers, having to plan our life around your procedures.

4. Remember Who I Am

Ok, so this is really about phone operators. Most of the time when I call a support line I end up with the wrong operator (see tip #5 for why this is). After explaining my long problem to the operator I tend to be redirected to another operator, which most of the times doesn’t seem to know who I am, what I want or that I have been redirected.

The first and second problems are “expectable”, but the last one is really ridiculous. How hard is it to have some system (I know that all these helpdesks have very complex systems running already) that know that I just spoke to Operator X, and that I have been redirected because of an issue surrounding Item Y? This should be so easy to implement and really removes the stress of the customers, and even gives a more personal experience.

5. Replace the Computerized Menu (with a Receptionist)

I think it happens to most people that when they call a number and get a computer menu, they just don’t seem to get to the menu they are looking for. Not only is this bad design by the makers of these systems, but it also leads to groups of people that either just do something, or people that go for the “press 9 to speak with a real person”-option. This is why I tend to end up it with the wrong operator and have to explain things over and over to the next operator.

I had a far better experience a while back when I called a company that had a real person pick up the phone, ask you for your intentions and then throw you in a queue that fitted the issue. This made so much more sense, as it saved me and the company time. In addition it also felt more personal, as I knew for sure I was in the right queue and in good hands. I think I was even less eager to hang up if the queue happened to be long.

6. Call me Back

British Telecom recently showed me that there is a better way to handle long phone queues, by having the option to be called back after pressing a simple code. This really made it less tiring to wait. I did still have to wait an hour before they called me back, and after that I even ended up in another queue, but at least this time it was on their costs.

In The Netherlands a minister recently wanted to introduce a law that people only pay phone costs for conversations, not queues. This is technically a bit difficult to accomplish, but a call-back policy would do just fine too.

7. Don’t be Afraid of a Smart Customer

I am a Mac user, as are the other FourStarters authors, and I know from experience that every time you call some kind of IT involved helpdesk and mention this fact, they totally stress out. A while back I called the Orange support line for my router, and after a few steps through their routine the operator wanted me to do something Windows only. I asked her what she wanted me to do, so that I could copy the process on my Mac (she wanted me to do an “ifconfig” command). On the word “Mac” she totally stressed out and dropped all responsibility and before I could say a word I was in a queue for Mac users.

The point here is that I happened to have a lot of knowledge in the area that I was calling about, and that is probably why I am even on a Mac. In other words: I was a smart customer that should have been handled with a different approach than a John Doe that just ordered his first internet connection. This goes with non-computer-related topics too as my father, who is a car technician, has the same problem when he calls a car company with some questions. In the end we are probably the easiest users to help, so don’t be afraid of us.

8. Take Responsibility

My last tip is a bit general, and affects many areas. Responsibility is an important issue to me and I want a company that I buy things from to have a lot of it. One example of where this often goes wrong is the example I mentioned in tip #7 where the operator used the “not my responsibility”-argument to throw me in a queue to another operator as soon as she could. It is just so easy to throw a customer from one operator to the other, but it doesn’t help the experience for the customer.

This also goes for inter-company issues, as when I buy a product at company A I would never like to be referred to a different company for my issues. A good (or is it bad) example are shops that tend to refer to the manufacturer for all your problems, making it unclear for the client what he needs for his guarantee, and increasing the amount of calls that have to be made. Not to mention the amount of throwing around between two companies that people have to endure.

When I buy a product or a service at a company, I buy it with them because I trust in them to take care of me. For any service I hope to be served through them, and with some proper respect. Again, it is just so easy to send a customer from one helpdesk to the other, but it doesn’t help the experience for the customer.

Conclusions

In the end I think we can conclude from my tips that it isn’t always all about reaching a goal, but also about the process. It is good if a helpdesk has a 99% success rate for solving everyone’s problems, but it has little meaning if it takes the customer through hell and back before they get there. The customer will probably even be nicer to the operator if the experience was pleasant.

I hope this will help some helpdesk-managers or technicians come up with some proposals, as I really feel that a lot can be done to remove all these frustrations.

As far as I know, you pay a network a set amount of money per second to air a given commercial in a given timeslot.

That doesn’t strike me as economically optimal, though.

People zap away during commercials, but I doubt people zap away during a funny or catchy commercial that they haven’t seen before. If it’s funny enough, they won’t zap away at all.

A very annoying commercial, like this one (turn your speakers off - some screaming zombielike thing pops up midway - people with a weak heart should probably not watch it at all) will immediatly get people diving for the remote to turn the volume down. And once you’re holding the remote, zapping is that much easier.

On the other hand, anytime an ‘apeldoorn’ advertisement (like this one) comes along, I’ll keep watching, even if I’ve seen them before.

Thus I’d argue the cost to run an ad on a tv network should be not just a function of duration and timeslot, but also of how long its been running (how boring it has become, basically), and how ‘funny’ it is, though how you’d rate that I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader.

Even without the networks creating incentives for companies to make funny or intriguing advertisements, the internet’s always a help: interesting ads tend to see lots of free publicity once the youtube video gets posted.

For example, I thought this mini pie catapult was so funny, I just had to write an article about it. Talk about viral!

TipIt.to has been nominated for the category Beta & Stealth for The Next Web Awards. I think this is quite amazing for a company without a product (although this is obviously a reason why they are nominated in this Beta & Stealth category). I was amazed that Soocial was not nominated with all the buzz around them lately. Let’s see how far TipIt.to will manage to get in this category by all voting for them.

The award ceremony of this award will be on the 1st of June at The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam.

I had a quick look at the Apple TV just before I went to The Netherlands for a short holiday. Set aside the big selling points of the Apple TV (Music, Series, Movies) there are two major features that I have to note.

1. The interface (above) looks a lot like Front Row, but then better. And this is what excites me: is Front Row in Leopard going to be like this? I sure hope so, and I think it actually might because Apple announced a major Front Row update at WWDC2006.
2. The guys from TWiT noted that Podcasts are in the main menu on the Apple TV. In other words this means that videopodcasters can now literally compete with mainstream TV. I think we will be seeing new HD vodcasts that are encoded with the special Apple TV Quicktime export soon.

For years I have found Yahoo to be a “shit” company. This is mainly because my mother kept using Yahoo Messenger while this product proved to be very open to hackers. Frequently she asked me if I (as I am a computer science student) could write her a program to restart other people’s pc (in other words hacking) because this often happened to her. Obviously she wanted some revenge.

So I never used Yahoo, not their messenger nor their email. Strangely I do use del.icio.us and Flickr, two sites bought by Yahoo. On Flickr the presence of Yahoo is steadily growing, causing many problems recently when they forced all old-school users like me to switch to a Yahoo account. On del.icio.us though, they are not that present. On the front page they are not even named.

So what is happening here? When Google buys a product they often totally integrate that product in their own services. Is Yahoo aware of their own (bad) vibe with users, and are they becoming more of a consortium of other services besides their own brand? Maybe one day del.icio.us will also be rebranded to a Yahoo product. I must say that I like most of the newly bought Yahoo products, so on that fact they are creating a better vibe in my sense.