Reducing volume in your call center is simple, hide your number.

I recently had a small issue with Verizon that I wasn’t able to resolve on the web site.  Not a big deal.  But when clicked on ‘Contact Us’ and then ‘By Phone’, instead of giving me the phone number, I was met with a pop-up window that said:  “We’re sorry…we are not able to process your request.”  Great, if you are going to hide the number you need to cough it up when we follow the clicking path to get it!  Is this a new call avoidance tactic that I missed? Now my small problem is bigger.  Understandably miffed, I relayed this story to a co-worker who had just called Verizon a week prior and had a completely different experience.  She said she got right through to a knowledgeable call center agent and after the billing issues were resolved was transferred to another live agent in service to get the phone line checked.  She even said how surprised she was that a company so big had such good customer service, while I on the other hand, couldn’t even locate a number to call.  Do you worry about the consistency of the customer service experience?  Are you protecting your brand by having a uniform calibration process and parameters for evaluating service?

While collecting scores and customer comments for analysis as part of our External Quality Monitoring (EQM) managed services we uncover significantly more than ratings about contact center agents.  See what I mean:  

“I tried calling your service number and each time it rang once and disconnected me. Talk about poor customer satisfaction.”

“I usually get right to a contact center agent whenever I have service issues but this time when I called I was on hold for 30 minutes.  I got so frustrated I finally hung up.  What gives?”

“Every time I order from your company my package is delivered quickly but this time it took almost a month and it was damaged.  I don’t know what’s going on with your customer service.”

“Last week I was told by Kevin that I would get a form in the mail to request my refund.  I didn’t get the form so I called today and was told by Susanne that I am not eligible for a refund and she’s not sure why Kevin told me that I was.”