Posted by
Dan Abbett on Sunday, July 20, 2008 7:18:05 PM
You already know what your choice is, you need to speak with a real person and for the past several minutes, you have been ushered through a half dozen voice menus. You have pressed one, three, five and pound. You have entered document numbers, loan numbers, trailing digits of your social security number and still no human voice. You are about to give in to your frustrations when at last, the words you have been waiting for, “if you need to speak to a representative press 1 now.”
There is call screening and call screaming. The first is a way to minimize the requirement to employ a cadre of receptionists to do nothing more than direct your call. The latter however, is the result of the final gasp of tolerance, from the person desperately trying to acquire specific information relative to their own issue or account. Yes, you know the point of breaking, when you scream into the mouthpiece of your telephone, “expletive a bunch of numbers, just put a person on the line!” And the earpiece responds, “please press 1 now.”
Voice menu telephone systems assume that callers will be able to satisfy their inquiry from the myriad of options and sub-menus. Callers meanwhile, have to play mental gymnastics to decide just which of the sixty-seven items they heard most closely approximates the issue they called about. Yes, you guessed it, the option you picked wasn’t the one that addressed your issue and you have been re-directed to the main menu to choose again. AARRrraaaaagghhhhhh!
For large institutions, there is value added in providing a voice menu to guide callers to their most frequently asked questions. Those who use computers would recognize this as the acronym “FAQS.” For courtesy’s sake however, one of the first options in the menu should be to choose to talk to a human. This is especially true, after you have succumbed to the drudgery of sifting through the labyrinth of nested menus, entered all digits as prompted and are rejected anyway because you weren’t calling from the phone you originally listed.
Productivity has its point but people are the key to successfully resolving people issues that cannot and never will be a subset of telephone messaging. Businesses have an obligation to operate as efficiently as possible, to maximize their profitability to their business and their investors. They have an even greater obligation to their customers however, to ensure their needs are met with dignity and not the indignity of an automated response system.
Imagine the frantic person who just received an erroneous statement, declaring them in egregious default of until that point, an impeccable account. Consider the range of emotions from frustration and bewilderment to exasperation and anger, as they furiously pound on the number pad of their telephones in response to a digitized voice. Worse, the distraught caller reaches an East Coast business at 4:00 PM Pacific Coast time. “We’re sorry, all of our offices are closed. To leave a voice mail on our automated voice response system, please press 1 now.”
Nothing will ever surpass the quality of doing business in person, whether over the phone or face to face. Only people have the ability to understand and respond to the personal circumstances that affect our daily lives.
If you believe you have received this message in error or you wish to leave a message, please press 1 now.