I’ve heard a lot about those outsourced call centers, mostly words of hate and frustration, but haven’t really experienced them much in my life (since most things that may require calling a “customer service representative” I can do online, and also I think I’ve been avoiding getting myself in situations that would ultimately necessitate me calling customer service).

However, a couple of weeks ago I’ve had the opportunity to experience them first hand. There was a chance i might not have been able to make an international flight and wanted to know what the terms and conditions were for canceling it. The website (Travelocity) didn’t have the information available so I had to call in. And here is when badness rears it ugly head.

First, the wait. I don’t mind waiting on line- I can do other things while I wait. It’s the randomness and abruptness that I didn’t like. During one call I had to wait five times, and the time varied from almost instantaneous to 20 minutes. It would be really good if I could get some feedback, for example if I knew how many customers were ahead of me (let alone some predictions based on historical data). The elevator music is simply distracting- probably because I was calling from a cell phone (who doesn’t these days?), the quality of the sound was abysmal and I’d get random white noise every few seconds during which I had no idea what was going on.

On to the actualy quality of service. I have nothing against outsourcing. It’s a good model, very scalable (practically infinite bandwidth, quickly adjustable based on random demand) and while it does take advantage of the disparity in world wages, I believe it ultimately results in economic growth of the countries we outsource the work to. But it has its costs, and I don’t think companies realize this. Customers certainly do, but I think by now they’ve grown accustomed to the poor quality of service, so there is no incentive for companies to make any improvements. A kind of vicious cycle that is frequently the target of the Daily Badness.

Why is the quality of service so bad? Again, I’m sure there are exceptions but I found the customer service people to lack common sense entirely, follow some really rigid runbooks, and not really engage in the problems the customers are having. This leads to really frustrating moments, like me having to repeat seven times that I don’t actually want to cancel my flight, I’m just gathering information, or be told conflicting information all the time because the callee has scratchpad memory the size of a small post-it note and doesn’t really listen to me. Call centers to me seem to do a kind of pattern matching that computers can easily do (there is no intelligence involved!) and my — granted, somewhat cynical — view is that the reason I had to call in in the first place is that it’s cheaper to pay the callees than to program in an automated solution to these “second order” problems. I mean, I should be able to simply go online, know exactly the terms of canceling a flight (rather than be told vaguely that “there will be fees between $0 and $200″).

And–my personal pet peeve–Travelocity customer representatives seem particularly hung up on repeating your entire itinerary back to you. How is this relevant to my problem?!

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 9th, 2009 at 23:42 and is filed under The Daily Badness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.