Interlinked Customer Services

So many companies these days offer more than one service, i.e. a mobile phone provider will also supply landline and broadband services. This, in theory, makes the customers lives easier because they can have one standing direct debit leaving their account each month and receive all the services they require. However, this often means that said company’s customer service departments are also combined which may not give you the best quality of service possible.

Most often when you connect to these companies’ telephone lines you will be immediately connected to an automated menu that requests customers to select the option that is closest to your enquiry. This allows them to connect you to the correct department but there is some scepticism among customers about whether there are actually different departments or whether it is just a tactic for delaying customers while an assistant becomes available. This is not a cynical view; it’s a logical tactic – keeping the customer interacting with the phone, for a limited amount of time, prevents them from being on-hold for great lengths of time which aggravates customers.

Call centre staff are trained to deal with all sorts of enquiries and people and there is a stigma around call centres and how frustrating they are for customers so often before there has even been any communication between the company and the customer. The customer service assistants therefore need to be extremely calm people who can remain thus even when they are dealing with customers unwilling to listen or cooperate. This can only be worsened if the customer finds that they have been connected through to the wrong department which can happen when these major companies do not have separate departments with individually trained staff.

Also, the stigma around call centres often includes the customer service assistants not actually having any significant knowledge on any of the products and services offered by the company and simply attempting to answer all of your enquiries from a planned script. This means customers rarely get the answer they were looking for but do get a lot of superfluous information that is spurted at them by the customer service assistant as they endeavour to find the correct answer without admitting that they don’t know off the top of their heads.

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