Call centres are a wonderful way to show how deeply you despise your customers.
Here are the broad principles of how to show your contempt for your customers through your call centre.
- Make it virtually impossible to track down the number of the call centre. Instead, force people through endless pages of internet verbiage in an attempt to deter them from contacting you.
- On no account offer a free phone number. Make sure the pesky customer pays you for the privilege of calling. By this time, the customer’s frustration should be transforming them slowly into an axe-wielding maniac.
- If the customer should get through to the call centre, let them talk to a gushing, enthusiastic computer voice that directs them through as many screens as possible. Make sure the option they are most likely to need comes out last from the last screen. Madness and death are not normally choices given to the customer, although they become increasingly likely outcomes.
- Should the customer finally find the option: “If you would like to talk to one of our agents…”, make sure that your agents do not answer the call for as long as possible. Let the customer listen to a Japanese version of “Greensleeves” 15 in succession. This can be interspersed with messages saying how much the customer’s call is valued. It is valued so much we can not be bothered to answer the call. By now the customer will either have lost the will to live, or grown old and senile and will have forgotten why they called in the first place. Telecoms companies have a particular aversion to answering the phone.
- If an agent accidently responds to the call, make sure that the agent is woefully underpaid, undertrained and under-equipped to deal with any customer service enquiries. Make them work from a long script, which starts by asking the customer to confirm a 15 digit alphanumeric password, plus their product code, plus the correspondence reference number and accurate recall of the first 200 digits of the number pi.
By now even you should have convinced the customer that:
Their time is worth much less than that of you lowest paid employee.
They are an extreme nuisance for calling.
Although “people come first, customers do not count as human beings.
Of course, all of these rules should be ignored completely if the customer wants to buy something. In this case, make sure there is a special hotline which is answered immediately by real human beings, who will commit their entire energy to taking money from the customer. At least, that is the theory. Anyone who has tried buying train tickets over the Web will know that train companies so dislike their customers that they do their best to stop them even buying tickets.
I am tempted to inaugurate the “Rotten Tomato” awards for the worst call centre and customer service providers. But I fear there are not enough rotten tomatoes in the world to do the honours.
