Customer Service King

So far 15,861 blogs are participating in Blog Action Day (today) with a combined total of more than 12 million readers. Following along with this year's theme - the environment - I thought I would add a few words in praise of the environmental benefits of call centers.

When you call a center center, you can get help or buy something without getting in the car and using gas.

That doesn't mean that faceless electronic communication is the only answer to environmental problems. The Office Stuffer blog tells about how musician Neil Young brings his music face-to-face with his fans using a bio-diesel tour bus. And Pharma Gazette advises you to bring your unused prescriptions back to the pharmacy instead of flushing them down the toilet.

But the creation and popularization of the call center allows mind resources to be centralized, instead of using fossil fuels to bring consumer and provider face to face. Fossil fuels are used to bring call center reps to the call center, and that's all.

An interesting reality of the call center world is that as much as reps dislike handling complaint calls, they would not have much of a job without them.

Here's another reason not to redo your lipstick while you're on a call: the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics has tested 33 leading lipsticks and found traces of lead in 60% of them. There was no difference between cheap brands and expensive brands: some discount lipsticks had no detectable lead (which proves that lipstick can be made without it) and some famous brands, such as L'Oreal Colour Riche "True Red" had up to 0.65 ppm (parts per million). In the US, candy can have up to 0.1 ppm, but that's permitted only for practical reasons - lead is naturally occurring in many substances. Still, no lead level is safe, since the neurotoxin builds up in the body throughout your lifetime. A commenter on a CTV.ca news story points out that if a woman reapplied L'Oreal Colour Riche three times a day, she would be officially lead poisoned at the 10 ppm level within three years.

In war games, the military has a blue team and a red team. Both teams are part of the same armed forces, of course. But for the purpose of the game, they are enemies. Each team works as hard as it can to win.

Why can't we have blue teams and red teams in call centers? And I don't mean QA competitions where the winner gets a free hour off the phone. Maybe divide your telemarketers into two groups, each enthusiastic for a different product. (If one team is much larger than the other, maybe you need to fix your products!) Let each team make suggestions to improve their sales script, and with management and marketing approval, actually use the revised scripts, at least on some calls.  The winner is the team who can make the most sales per day, perhaps adjusted by price or other factors that keep the two products from being equal.

Comparing business to warfare has gone out of fashion. Fewer CEOs are reading Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun than they used to. I was never sure how that would apply to my job. Was there going to be a sequel called "Customer Service Secrets of Attila the Hun"? I wasn't holding my breath. Good thing I didn't.

But is there anything that customer-facing representatives can learn from the art of war? Let's see. There are five fundamental principles of defensive marketing warfare strategies:

1. Always counter an attack with equal or greater force.
2. Defend every important market.
3. Be forever vigilant in scanning for potential attackers. Assess the strength of the competitor. Consider the amount of support that the attacker might muster from allies.
4. The best defense is to attack yourself. Attack your weak spots and rebuild yourself anew.
5. Defensive strategies should be the exclusive domain of the market leader.

Always counter an attack with equal or greater force.

Customers don't want to be attacked, but they do want you to attack their problems. If they point out that they're having a problem, attack it with equal or greater force. Don't just tell the customer, "I did everything I could" or "No, we don't offer that service." Keep working at it until you can say, "Here's what I did for you." If policies and products have to change, try to change them.

Defend every important market.

Call centers sometimes seem like a numbers game. You win some and you lose some.  A sales manager told me, "If you ask enough people to buy, eventually someone will say yes." But that doesn't mean that you should take No lightly. Ask yourself, "Did we lose this customer because another company could serve their needs better than we could?" If so, suggest to managment how your company could serve needs better. If not, keep serving them, keep thinking, until your company has served their needs.

Be forever vigilant in scanning for potential attackers.

Dpn't rest on your laurels, as the Romans would say. Don't decide that what you're doing is good enough. That's no way to get promoted, for one thing. Every time you solve a problem, ask yourself, "How could I done this better? Do other customers have the same problem? Does our company need to change our processes or products so that the next caller doesn't face the same discouragements? What problems can we fix now before they get worse?"

Even in call center management, suspicion can sometimes be good. If the alternative is complacency. Complacency in the face of competition can lead to defeat.

As we commemorate the launch of Sputnik, the first human satellite, fifty years ago, our first reaction might be, "What was the big deal? What was the United States afraid of? Why did the US need to spend billions of dollars to beat the Russians?"

As it turns out, and it's not something that Russian scientists have talked about until now, the rocket that fired Sputnik into space wasn't originally designed for launching satellites. It was designed for launching a hydrogen bomb. At the United States. If necessary.

American leaders didn't know everything, but they suspected anything. As a result, the United States launched a massive effort to improve its scientific abilities, drawing more young people (well, young men, at the time) to study science and technology. It paid off. A generation of technical know-how resulted from Sputnik. Enthusiasm for science has since dwindled in the United States, which is why American graduate schools are no longer full of Americans.

The call center industry has experienced some industry-changing events too, though we may not have understood it at the time, anymore than the US understood Sputnik. 

Apple has a smart phone. You want a smart phone. Everybody wants a phone like the one Apple has. Can Verizon give you one? Rich Tehrani and BizToolBelt share their opinions about Verizon's new intelligent phones: LG Voyager, LG Venus, Blackberry Pearl and Samsung Juke.

The LG VX10000 Voyager, unlike the iPhone, has a keyboard. I understand that Apple and AT&T have been getting a lot of questions about why they forgot to include one. Or did they forget? Did the product developers ask the call center reps what they thought before they released the iPhone? Didn't think so. Did they tell them in advance that they would be dropping the price and offering rebates? I didn't think so.

Customers don't like call center scripts. When they ask a question, they want a sincere, original answer, one that has been well thought out, preferably just for them. They don't want to hear the answer to someone else's question.

The article Taylorism and the Modern Call Center has a theory for why management wants call center agents to repeat the same things by rote, from a script: they want their employees to do as little thinking as possible. A script allows agents not to have to think so much, and it allows management and quality assurance not to have to worry so much about what the reps will say on their own.

Geoff Williams of Entrepreneur.com lists telemarketing as one of 10 Businesses Facing Extinction in 10 Years. Others industries he says are on their way out include payphones, gay bars, used bookstores, newspapers, and crop dusters.

Williams doesn't actually claim that telemarketing will become extinct.  In ten years, he says, "They'll be here. Humbled, more impotent, but probably still here." Like any intrusive form of communications, including advertising, telemarketing becomes less effective over time. And with the millions on Do Not Call lists, the number of people who can legally be called by telemarketers has drastically dwindled. (It's still legal to call people with whom your company has an existing relationship. And of course, the US Congress exempted political calls from the regulations. Naturally.)

So telemarketers are finding new ways to add people to their lists legally, including raffles at the mall (Win A Vacation and Many Phone Calls) and anything else they can do to get permission to call people.