And yet, marketing and customer service are mirror twins. Marketing targets and attracts the customers, then it hands them off to customer service. Customer service has the longer-term job of keeping marketing's promises--and of keeping the customer satisfied.
I read with great interest Your Call Is (not that) Important to Us: Customer Service and What It Reveals about Our World and Our Lives by Emily Yellin. Most of us "get" customer service. We understand how voicemail works, and how companies use customer relationship management (CRM) phone trees to try to keep us away from an actual expensive live operator.
What we don't all know is how those CRM systems work, what the best ones are accomplishing and the unintended consequences of the systems that make it deliberately hard to communicate.
I never thought about the relationship between the corporate toll-free number and longer wait times, but of course it's true that if the company is paying for a WATS line it feels free to keep me on hold--if I were paying for that air time I would revolt or hang up.
As much as companies may wish that I would serve myself by locating the right person through their phone tree or by referring to their website, telephone service is still a valuable outreach to customers who either don't have Internet access, don't read the language, or have a difficulty spanning departments that they can't shove into just one box.
I bookmarked page 84 in the chapter To Send Us Your Firstborn, Please Press or Say "One," glad to learn that I have allies among the experts.
a big pet peeve among top speech technology designers like Springer is the phrase, "Please listen carefully, as soon of our menu options have changed"....He thinks it should be banished from all speech systems, calling it "extremely controlling." And he asks, "Why take up eight seconds to say something so condescending?"
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