That Dropped Call With Customer Service? It Was on Purpose.
That Dropped Call With Customer Service? It Was on Purpose.
Endless wait times and excessive procedural fuss—it’s all part of a tactic called “sludge.”
I design contact centers for a living. I have done so for almost a quarter century now, until very recently I only had worked for Fortune 200 companies (moved to the public sector which is a nice change of pace).
A quick bit of jargon definition: We refer to various means of communication as "channels". A contact center is multi-channel if you can reach it by more than one channel (i.e. phone, SMS, chat, email, etc.). It is considered omni-channel if you can switch between these channels (supposedly seamlessly, but see below).
This article gets several points dead on and misses several more. Here is my professional take, make of it what you will.
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Call centers are expensive. Licensing and software costs are very high. There are few vendors who offer scalable omni-channel offerings and the licensing costs end up being exorbitant. And you need omni-channel contact centers because:
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Phones are the least efficient way to service customers. An agent can only be on the phone with a single customer at a time, but they can staff around 6 chat or email sessions simultaneously. For a customer, this devoted attention is a boon, but for a company it's very costly because Agents, even poorly paid ones, are the most expensive part of your contact center if you are paying benefits, and if you aren't you will not get good agents.
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Agent turnover is very high. Agents are poorly paid and their job sucks. They are driven by metrics that are poorly thought out, intended to drive efficiency but ultimately create poor behavior; the article gets this very correct. A lot of poor service you get is caused by agents trying to hit impossible metrics. Don't blame the agent, the managers are the problem here.
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The technology has gotten better - and worse. VOIP infrastructure radically reshaped contact center design and the migration to CCaaS reshaped it again, with some good sides and a lot of bad sides. Telephone technology is an aging tech with a substantial demographic issue. I am consistently the youngest member of my teams and I have been doing this for almost 25 years. Expertise is aging out of the field and taking a lot of knowledge with them. Further, the number of disciplines you need for expertise has dramatically increased. It is no longer enough to just know CCNA-level networking, wiring, PSTN tech, linux and windows servers administration, codecs, basic related legal knowledge (wiretapping laws, Ray Baume's Act, TEHO laws in India, etc.), design and infrastructure theory (like Poisson distribution), but now you also need to know Kubernetes, docker, ESXi (or equivalent), AWS, Azure, etc. It's a lot and nobody can know it all, the complexity of modern design and no education program to get there means there's just a lack of comprehensive understanding of the technology at a pretty fundamental level for most people trying to design and maintain this stuff. The result? A system designed around 99.999% uptime is now failing to meet that SLA, hell some vendors won't even promise it anymore but most will just lie and claim that they do. So there are reliability issues.
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AI. This one hits pretty closet to home for me because of a personal experience so a quick anecdote: at one job, I had a spirited discussion with the head of our IVR technology group over how effective AI would be at reducing call volume into the center. He initially had great success, reducing call volume by ~30% in the 6 months. He received accolades and commendations, a big bonus, he was riding high and honestly he deserved to be. The problem, and what prompted my attempt to intervene, was his promise to continue that trend, predicting that his AI tech could reduce human-required calls by 60% within the next 2 years.
To me, this was madness. His initial success was because he moved the payment system into the IVR instead of having agents do it. This is a no-brainer. Computers are quite capable of taking payments or listing basic account information, but more complex tasks involve a much greater up-front cost in technology development and we didn't have that budget, it was a massive over promise and I told everyone who I could to not take his estimation seriously. Unfortunately, he had a PhD and I am a college dropout, so they listened to him and cut 50% of their agent count via attrition. The results were predictably disastrous and the company hasn't yet been able to fix it years later (thankfully, I left that place).
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I don't think this is intentional per se. Having been in numerous meetings with leadership about contact center issues, I can say that they are just as upset by poor customer service as you are. There is no top-down effort to make your life suck. But line must go up and contact centers are always cost centers which means companies hate them, they don't view customer service as integral to making money despite understanding that angry customers will leave them so there is a constant budget short-fall. The issue isn't someone at the top thinking "If we treat our customer poorly enough they will stop calling and we'll save money!" It's just standard corrosive capitalism creating perverse incentives that make everything worse. It's a systemic problem.
Anyway, that's my view for whatever it's worth. I am glad to be in the public sector now, which has its own issues, but at least everyone is focused on actually providing service because the service is the value.
The old guard of the internet slowly retiring and leaving the new generation to take over will be such a mess in the nearby future. In the 90s-2000s a lot of sysadmins learned their skillsets by getting their hands dirty, sometimes even building ISPs from nothing. Nowadays most of the infrastructure has been laid out, it’s functional and only needs maintenance. I speak to some of the admins and a lot of them don’t even know what an ATS is. Very odd.
Thanks for this perspective. I cringed so hard at the part about the guy with the PhD being listened to over you, because I know so many dumbasses with PhDs.
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I have to take an expensive medication (Humira) to be able to walk. If I don't take it for long enough, I will be unable to work and therefore unable to afford the medication, and therefore unable to get back to work effectively. It's illegal to discriminate for disabilities but it would legitimately make it very difficult to do my job with severe arthritis symptoms. CVS Specialty Pharmacy, in conjunction with CVS Caremark makes me spend 20+ hours a year on the phone getting this medication, overcharges me, and has intentionally built all of their systems to be as inefficient as possible, even when it doesn't really benefit them to do so. One time I was pissed off enough about an issue that I looked up a list of executives and sent every permutation of all of their names @ cvs.com an email explaining my displeasure about this and with them as human beings who should be ashamed of themselves. It accomplished nothing except getting me in contact with an "executive care coordinator" who was just another useless customer service drone who wasn't actually allowed to do anything to fix anything. I have been dealing with this for years at this point. I am not able to switch to another pharmacy or benefit manager due to how my employer's insurance works, and realistically the only other alternative in this space if you work for a big company is United Healthcare, and they are apparently just as bad. I have tried to complain to my employer about the unacceptable state of their health insurance benefits and they don't give a shit. I have contacted my government representatives. They don't give a shit. I have done literally everything I can think of and nothing has changed, nothing will change, and I don't think that in the current system that anything can change.
So yeah, when I saw what a particular beloved Mario brother did, I laughed my ass off and cracked open a beer when I got off work to celebrate. I am legitimately surprised it took so long for someone to lose it and do something drastic. Every time I have to deal with these fuckers I just think about how much angrier and more desperate I could be if my medical issues were worse or if it was my kid I was fighting for. It was inevitable that someone would be driven to violence, and unless something changes, it will happen again. I don't really condone violence like this because I don't think it's good for society or for the person committing the violence, but when the system is designed in this way, these companies are effectively committing violence against all of us disguised as bureaucracy and hidden behind human shields of front line customer service staff. It is, therefore, completely understandable, and in my opinion, inevitable, that some people are going to respond with violence of their own when faced with such hopeless injustice. I'm just glad he got the right guy in this case and didn't go off the deep end and decide to shoot up a call center or hospital.
It's crazy to me that your health care is dictated by your company that you work for.
Companies are known to try make money not spend it.
I say this sitting in a hospital now at 1am with my wife cause she's having very bad pains during pregnancy all for free, despite them saying we will likely have to drive 20kms to the next hospital because this one is underfunded and understaffed
I've always suspected this. Wild to see it in print as a strategy though. Infuriating position to be in and instantly erodes any sense of brand loyalty.
Good article, but the bit about airline customers being only slightly less likely to use the airline they hate is hardly something you can blame on customers.
If the alternatives either don't exist (e.g., United is the only feasible route between city A and City B), or they are both shitty (Delta is just as shitty as United, so the fact that United breaks guitars doesn't mean I'm more likely to pick Delta), then poor customer service is just the cost of existing.
Same situation as price gouging, or Apple vs Google, Ford vs Chevy, or Samsung vs LG. Yeah, you have options, but none of them respect you. So you can not travel, not communicate, and not be entertained, or you can "voluntarily" participate in what society has become.
Wait, did people not know this is a common, intentional practice?
As common as claiming you're chatting with a real support person that is actually a bot/llm, even though the first part of the bot told you it was transferring you to a 'real person', and the wait time was between 60 and 180 seconds?
It is a business decision to have terrible customer service.
Too many businesses grow and merge beyond their ability to support their customers. I say companies shouldn't be allowed to merge unless their average time to connect callers to a live person is less than one minute.
I would argue that it's more a consequence of a whole series of poorly thought-out business decisions. Customer service is a cost center, meaning it doesn't bring in revenue. So it's one of those things that executives like to target for cost-cutting measures because any amount they can reduce spending there improves their overall bottom line. So we get things like:
- Outsourcing CS. Maybe in the US, but more likely overseas
- Reduced training
- Rules for call handlers that are meant to encourage solving problems quickly, but effectively punish them for providing good service when they are unable to do that.
When the only meaningful metric they look at is "how little can we spend?" the only logical conclusion is that service is going to suffer. The actual cost of poor customer service is a lot more difficult to pin down and measure.
Sorta... I mean there are CSAT scores that can be used and also customer churn. But deciding to not spend money to support your customers is totally a business decision.
What about states? Ever had to call unemployment? Lucky enough to be in a US state with paid leave? They are websites that make 1998 1.0 look decent. Their phone trees just dump you when you call them and say they are overloaded. No email, no ticket support online. So no web, phone or email support for those you are beholden to.
States aren't trying to turn a profit, what is the incentive to have unemployment and paid leave broken in states that have passed them as law?odt of the states with paid leave tout them and promote how great they are but make the process a gauntlet of cirizen-hating obstacles.
Looking at you CA, OR and WA.
It's the same. Poor service is a choice they make
And the state doesn't want you to not be a slave for more than a second.
Reason I don't move to the US despite "the wages are better" #321. I never had to deal with this. If I was the person in the car, I would have just sent an email to Consumer Protection, and they would have dragged the dealer to arbitration. BTW arbitration here doesn't mean "court-but-paid-by-the-company", that's illegal, it's just that they try to cut through this exact bullshit without going to court and incurring fees. If the company representative does not show up, it's grounds for a quick judgement against the company at court afterwards, and the authority also reviews if the company should even have a business licence if this keeps happening.
There’s a timer that starts on your call to be done within, say, 20 minutes, and to get you the fuck off the phone. The employee is punished if you’re still on the line, so they have zero incentive to keep the call going. Click. Then who wants to call back to another phone tree to complain about… who was it again?
Protip: take copious notes, and if you are fortunate enough to live in a single-party consent state and are talking to someone who can get results, get a recording.
Just to note, if the line says the call may be recorded for quality control purposes - they gave consent.
Consent is a weird word in the context its used for private recordings. A better word for laypeople would be disclose or notice. In those states you just have to mention that you are recording.
The consent is not an active agreement to be recorded, but a passive consent by continuing the call after the notice is given.
"This call may be recorded" does mean you may record the call.
My state is single consent and I was recording a call with att once and the rep straight up tried to gaslight me. When I told her that I was recording this, so I can play back exactly what she said, she told me that she's in California and didn't give consent. I laughed and told her that since I'm not sitting in California I don't really care about their laws at the moment.
We are living in the state of Fuck it.
pretty much sums it all up right there.