One of the points he made was that we should look at customer service "not as a way of avoiding your customers but as a way of engaging them”
As a person who has been working in customer service for 7 years now out of which almost 2 were spent in a good old call center I can only applaud him. I'm afraid the classic image of an angry customer yelling on the phone while the customer service rep is playing some computer game is not that far from the truth. Not because that particular CSR does not want to do his job but because he had 20 other customers before yelling at him that they were kept on hold for half an hour, that the call center working hours are not suitable for their schedule, that the service is crap, that the product is even crappier, that the instruction manual / help topics incomprehensible and the voice of the automated messages annoying. And he has no time to pay too much attention to your issue because he has to close the call in 5 minutes cause that's the TAT and the manager is monitoring closely on how many calls he handled and how fast he hung up after providing "the best service".
While working in the call-center we used to say “I need a break from this madness, I’m going to stay long on the next call”. Funnily enough staying long meant actually providing the best service: listening carefully, answering all questions, researching the issue and taking everything step by step without rushing through the call, talking about the kids, the weather etc. It also meant you not making your quota. As call centre CSRs we had fast wrapping up techniques, prefabricated speeches depending on the situation (we used to call them "poems") and a good deal of training on working efficiently. Which basically meant how to extract the information without really listening and how to address the problem without really giving a damn.
In a world of efficiency numbers and cost-effective stats, 100 answered emails per day and 200 calls per hour, we lose what Lane Becker is talking about in the above video: communication. Conversation. Exchange of information, views, ideas. Social skills.
Everybody hates prefabricated communication, everybody hates robots, automated emails, automated systems, please press 1. All these are designed to offer scalable support but unfortunately most of them fail miserably when it comes to customer satisfaction. Because of the lack of interaction and the so much needed "human touch".
So how about trying to connect with people (customers)? And more importantly connect all those people between themselves: people with questions to people with answers, people ready to talk to people ready to listen, people with ideas, people with feedback, people with opinions. We might even learn something. We might learn how to listen and communicate, we might help some people and also have people help each other and themselves. We might understand what our customers want and need from us. We might see where we are good and where we fail. People might hear and talk about us. We might build a brand.
Nowadays with Internet making communication so much easier I think that it's time for many to move away from the old model and concentrate more on building communities and relationships. In the end as Ted Coine said in one of his tweets : “Customers stray for the same reason spouses do: they aren’t feeling your love!”
