Businesses lack expert operators
The cry of lost souls echoes through the electronic wilderness: “I can’t reach a human being! I have to talk to an actual person! What can I do to reach a human being?”
This desperation does not go unheeded. There is always a soothing response:
“Your call is important to us.”
“All of our operators are busy assisting other customers.”
“Oh, no, they’re not!” shouts the exasperated customer into the void. “There are no such operators. You put your customers in an endless loop, going from one recording to another until they get back to the beginning – if anyone can make it back before getting cut off. And don’t tell me about your Web site, which never responds to my questions, if it responds at all. There’s no human being running that. It sends me the answer to a question I didn’t ask – sometimes days late.”
Miss Manners’ inclination is to pour out her sympathy. It is a plight that surely falls under her mandate of comforting those afflicted by the callousness of others. Besides, like everyone else, she has been caught in such fruitless loops.
In the etiquette business, we are forever carrying on about the need for a personal touch, however much of a burden it is to put pen to paper instead of firing off a pre-selected message.
Etiquette’s prejudice for the personal is commonly mistaken for a blanket antipathy toward technology and indeed toward progress itself. Such is not the case.
She is on the record as having been first to defend such useful appliances as the telephone answering machine and the cellular telephone. Naturally, Miss Manners demands that these items be used politely, as she does in connection with everything from kid gloves to hockey sticks. When they are not, she blames the mis-user rather than the tool.
And now she is going to become the only consumer to defend recorded messages. But at least she promises to do this in a half-hearted way.
Not everything needs talking over. Many questions can be predicted. Properly programmed, recorded voice messages can be faster and more accurate than people. They don’t call you by your first name. They don’t recognize your voice if you call back too often.
Of course, a business that uses them is obligated to make human beings available for special cases, not to make the operator option another dead end. Beyond that, it is obligated to have such operators equipped with the judgment and authority to solve problems.
That is the crux of the consumer service problem: that their live people, when one reaches them, are rarely equipped to weigh an uncommon problem judiciously and offer a solution. The unspoken deal was that businesses would save money by using recordings and spend some of it on training the people they are supposed to have available. Few have lived up to the deal.