Is Your Contact Center An Annoying, Time Waster?

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Over the weekend, I was doing a little research and I stumbled across an article on listserve written in 2010 – 10 Most Annoying Time-Wasters. The article is a list of 10 things that both annoy you and waste your time, surprisingly Customer support services ranked 2nd place on the list, just behind the ‘Tyranny of choice‘ consumers face as a result of having an overabundance of choices to make.

Image credit: www.listverse.com

The writer ‘VANOWENSBODY’ had this to say –

Very closely related to telephone directories is the modern annoyance of poor (or non-existent) customer support. You have a problem or a question, or perhaps a complaint about a product or service? You pick up the phone and call the company (or you can email them but the result is typically the same). You weave your way through the labyrinth of confusing telephone directory menu options until you finally arrive at (possibly) a human being to talk to. You think you have wasted many minutes of your life so far? The time wasting has only begun. If you are lucky, you will have called a company that “gets it” and has excellent or even good customer support, you will reach a knowledgeable, helpful, trained and friendly customer support person. But sadly, more often than not today, you reach a person who is just the opposite.

In fact, many companies today deliberately use customer support people who are anything but supportive. The customer support person you reach is often overworked, burned out and doesn’t care. Whatever the reason, you are about to enter the Twilight Zone of time wasting frustration. You all know the routine. The customer support person can’t help you, or delays helping you because “their computers are down”. Or they can’t help you so they transfer you to someone else who can, and you wait on hold for untold scores of minutes. This other support person never answers, or takes a very long time to answer, and it ends up they can’t help you either in which case they transfer you to a third person, or refer you back to the person you first spoke to. In the phone call transfer process, often times you get disconnected and the line goes dead and you need to call back and start through the labyrinth all over again. All of this wastes hours, days, weeks, months of your life.

The article made me wonder if that’s the general public perception of contacting customer support, so I did some more digging and I came across another article (Why Customer Service Calls Waste So Much Time) According to the results of a survey by customer service software company Kana –

Consumers spend an average of 384 minutes – that’s almost six and a half hours – each year dealing with customer service complaints.

Personally, I think technology has come a long way in the past 6 years, consumers now have a variety of platforms available to contact their brands, thanks to social media & Instant messaging evolving as customer service tools, so these figures ought to have improved positively by now.

See also  Customer Service Story - Steve's Pizza

But the question you should ask now is whether your contact center is making optimal use of currently available tools and platforms that can enhance customers’ experience and improve the public perception of your brand? or Is it just another annoying time waster?

Kelechi Okeke
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