The Global Association for Contact Center Best Practices & Networking

This is a retail banking, or mortgage situation. In the course of buying a home sometimes you must produce documents that your bank has, that you may not save. I was required to provide some past bank records. As I moved around the country I retained them as my bank even though they may not have been locally where I was, just because I always had really good service with them.

This is somewhat contrary to that. I picked up the phone to call them and get some of these records. The first frustrating part is that it took about five minutes to navigate through an IVR system that didn't seem to be very well programmed to get me where I wanted to get.

When I finally got through to a live person it was the wrong individual, so they put me back in the IVR system again. After another five minutes of navigating again I finally got through to the right individuals. There were still several frustrating points. The first being after I went through entering all this information in their IVR I still had to go through the exhausting process of telling them what my name is and what my account number is and all that information, making me wonder why did they bother collecting that on the front end. But after I went through the entire process of providing them with all this information, I placed my order for the documentation I needed. About a week later I received the information and it was not what I ordered. They also charged me twice as much as they were supposed to charge me. So I had to go back and navigate through the entire system again. When I got through to the people they had no record of my order, and they have no record of the conversation of the call I had with them. They then created a "he said she said" type situation where they didn't know what I had requested or ordered. Ultimately it ended up costing me a couple of hundred dollars in fees that I'm still in the process of trying to get them to replace, and a lot of my time.

This happened because they didn't seem to have their system on the front and their IVR coordinated with whatever system they had in place. Then when it came down to actually trying to verify the transaction, they had nothing in place for that either. It was discouraging to see a company that had obviously spent a lot of money investing in certain tools, missing some of the core pieces that they need for the transaction verification.

If I were strictly a consumer who knew nothing about the industry I would have been furious. That was enough of an inappropriate way of handling a customer to make me want to change banks. With the consumer's transaction if there has to be a lot of loyalty and you need to do a good job and make sure that you are treating people right. I was extremely disappointed with a company of that size doing such a poor job utilizing their customer's technology. After this experience I told my wife to go look at some local banks. I lived as far away as Utah which is fifteen hundred miles away from the nearest branch, and I had been banking through mail because I was so happy with a lot of the stuff that they offered.

That experience was enough to make me think maybe they don't get it when it comes to customer service and customer care, and I'm not even an exceptionally needy customer. I do though have basic expectations. When I pick up the phone I don't mind going through IVR but I expect it to get me somewhere. If I need to find someone I expect to find them through a series of punches not five minutes of playing a telephone. I think it is a trap when companies implement technology on the front end of any customer service experience. I think that they just put it there and try to use it as a way of just using touchtone instead of the customer experience. I don't' believe in it that but I do think that that there is a need for appropriately getting people in touch with person to person conversations. As a result of this particular experience I don't think that I will retain my business with them.

Chris Homer - Vice President Sales/Marketing, VoiceLogger

In addition to being a vendor of call center tools for performance management I am a consumer. I tend to be an early adopter of different consumer technologies, a couple of examples that come to mind we have an early MP3 player, I went to a consumer retail store to get it and it was right around the time that I was getting married so I wanted to load up all of my songs and have everything ready for the trip. My wife and I were going to Europe, the Mediterranean. So the guy in the retail store said you need this firewire adapter so I bought it but I didn't install it before I went on the trip.

When I got back I went to install the firewire adapter and it didn't work. They had recommended the wrong product. So I brought it back to the store and said I actually need a different kind of adapter and they said your thirty days are up and we can't take it back after that. I said that they actually recommended the wrong product and I was on my honeymoon and I just got back and I don't want to refund I just want to swap it. They said sorry you can't have it back. So I asked to speak with the store manager (who I could see from behind the glass) and they went and asked her and she refused to speak with me.

It was only like a twenty five dollar purchase so I was a little disgruntled. I went back and called the 1-800 number which I found on the web-site, and I spoke to someone who said why don't you put it in writing we can't help you. So I sent an e-mail, again just trying to state the case which is that the wrong product had been recommended and that yes, I was aware that my thirty days were up, but it was sort of an extenuating circumstance because I was on my honeymoon. I just got an auto reply that said we'll get back to you and then I never heard from anyone again.

So that was the last time that I ever purchased anything from that large consumer retail store. I did try call center I did try e-mail, if they had chat I would have used it, I was willing to try every form of communication and I was left an unhappy customer. As someone in the service world I just wanted to get a good explanation and I guess I wanted a little attention. It was only a twenty-five dollar product but I do by a reasonably large number of electronics and I am someone who travels a lot so I am a pretty significant consumer of technology and they haven't seen another dollar of mine. So that is my bad experience.

Mark Selcow - President & Co-Founder, Merced Systems

My bad experience with call centers has to deal with dealing with a major computer company. I called a toll free number and I got an outsource center in India. The person's accent was so bad that I couldn't understand them and they couldn't understand my southern accent enough to even get the number I had to give them off the computer so they could look up my information. After about ten minutes of trying they had to transfer me to, to someone else to try to figure this out. They dropped the call when they tried to transfer me, and I had to call back and start over and they had not started a ticket so I had to start all over again with my problem.

It took another thirty minutes for them to say that they couldn't fix my problem and that I would have to talk with a supervisor. I got to the supervisor and they still didn't know how to fix my problem, so I ended up on the phone with them for about and hour and a half and I still didn't get my problem solved. There are still things on my computer that don't work but I haven't called back because I had such a bad experience with them. I know that their second line support is in Nashville but unfortunately you have to go through their first line support in India first. That was my worst experience

Vicki Herrell - Marketing Director, Society Of Workforce Planning Professionals (SWPP)