I will never understand…

I will never understand why Advertising is an investment and customer service is a cost.
Let’s spend millions trying to reach people, but if they try to reach us, make our contact details impossible to find, incentivise call center workers to hang up as fast as possible or ideally outsource it to a bot. It’s absolute lunacy and it absolutely matters
.”
Tom Goodwin
here.

Couldn’t agree more Tom. In fact, we’ve spoken about this exact irony here on PAOSS a few times before (eg herehere and here).

Telcos call it CVR – Call Volume Reduction (ie reduction in the number of customers’ calls that are responded to by a real person who represents the telco). But what CVR really translates to is, “we’re happy for you to reach us on our terms (ie if you want to buy something from us), but not on your terms (ie you have a problem that needs to be resolved).” Unfortunately, customer service is the exact opposite – it has to be on the customer’s terms, not yours.

Even more unfortunately, many of the problems that need to be resolved are being caused in our OSS / BSS (not always “by” our OSS / BSS, but that’s another story). Worse still, the contact centre has no chance of determining where to start understanding the problem due to the complexity of fall-out management and the complicated data flows through our OSS / BSS.

Bill Gates said, “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

Let me ask you a question – Do you have a direct line of learning from your unhappy customers to your backlog of OSS / BSS enhancements? Or even an indirect line of learning? Nope?? If so, you’re not alone.

Let me ask you another question – You’re an OSS expert. Do you have any idea what problems your customers are raising with your contact centre staff? Or perhaps that should be problems they’re not getting to raise with contact centre staff due to the “success” of CVR measures? Nope?? If so, you’re not alone here either.

Can you think of a really simple and obvious way to start fixing this?

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