Pi-Consulting

You know what an oxymoron is: it’s one of those definitions that internally contradicts itself, like “Military Intelligence” (thank you, Groucho Marx) and “Compassionate Conservatism”, (the drowned remains of which went to a watery grave under the New Orleans levees last year).

Here’s an oxymoron for our times: “Customer Service Line”.

Everyone who has had occasion to phone one recently will know what we are talking about. All you wanted was politely and good-naturedly to report your problem to a fellow human being, and hear what they were proposing to do about it.

Instead, you listened to a recording so meaninglessly and ingratiatingly upbeat that the lady who made it HAD to be on happy pills, you listened to six series of four options which failed to include the one you wanted, and you wound up in a loop of endlessly repeating but totally irrelevant instructions to “contact your so-and-so supplier”. If you were lucky, you were then treated to a music loop-tape that sounded like Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik played on half-empty pickle jars. If not, you were simply dumped into that eerily silent corner of electronic space-time from whose bourne no traveler returns. That’s when you threw the telephone handset at the wall, and shouted to anyone who happened to be listening that you would sooner die than do business with (supply company name here) ever again.

Customer service? More like a foolproof mechanism for avoiding human contact with your customers, let alone having to satisfy them about anything.

It doesn’t take the massed talents of the Harvard Business School to figure out that hiding behind the voice-recorded equivalent of a barbed-wire fence is probably bad for business. How can this imbecility be so widely practiced by companies whose mission statements formally commit them to “listening to the voice of the consumer”? And how did those companies plan to do so without ever actually answering the #!^%* phone?

We’re guessing, but we suspect that the honest answer in most cases would be “We’re on a cost-cutting drive, and dealing with all those callers in real time would be prohibitively expensive”.

One recipient of 21st-century corporations’ maddening refusal to talk to people decided to fight back, as reported recently in the New York Times. Entrepreneur Paul M. English lost his rag in the Summer of 2005, did some research, and posted an item on his long-standing blog. It was in effect a leaked “magic code-book” giving out keypad sequences that would get his fellow-sufferers past various companies’ wall of blather and “options”, and instead put them through instantaneously to an “RHB” (or Real Human Being).

The result was electrifying. Visitors to English’s blog applauded, added more codes to the ones English had unearthed, and started spreading the word to others. The result was first a slew of articles in the mainstream press, then a decision to start GetHuman.com, a dedicated website for those who wanted not just to get mad, but to get even ….or perhaps just to get through. The site identifies itself as the spearhead for a fight-back movement to “change the face” (or more properly the voice) “of customer service”. A large electronics retailer’ secret code is apparently 111##, followed by ignoring three dummy prompts demanding your home phone number. Reaching an “RHB” at a well-known bank is as simple as dialing 0#0#0#0#0#0#. And so on. The secret call-through pathways of four hundred companies have already been revealed to their frustrated customers.

English describes his site as a crusade against corporate arrogance. “Why do the executives running these call centers think they can decide when I deserve to speak to a human being and when I don’t?”, he reasonably asks.

Curiously, there is an upside to all this for the companies concerned, did they but know it. First, the pressure to respond can prompt them to simplify and streamline such procedures as online ordering of goods and the tracking of internet orders. If those things happen more smoothly, many irate phone calls would never be made in the first place. And when the aggrieved and frustrated consumer does get through, says Richard Shapiro of the Center for Client Retention, “Companies will find that customers who interact with human beings are more likely to volunteer useful information, try a new product, or develop a loyalty to the company concerned. Excessive voice automation eliminates all that”.

Okay, caller, I’ll just put you on hold while you think about that. Here’s a little music…..