Callous Call Centers

I belong to the service industry – 19 years for now. I can understand what makes a customer happy.

I live in Bangalore – the capital of all call centers of the world for the past eight years.

If I had a question earlier – I directly used to call the person in charge. I normally get a reply before the telephone receiver changed hands three times. Not a big pain.

Things have changed now. If I go to any service institution – I see notices which say that no enquiries are allowed. For questions – I need to go to the call center. I hear that it is normally 24 hours and for 365 days. My experience is rather bitter.

The first impression is that all call centers are a maze. It has been designed to discourage people from making enquiries. It starts simple enough – press 1 for language and so on. Then it gets complicated. After nine or ten such answers question you will find yourself lost – totally lost. Or you are bound to forget what you wanted to ask and worse scenario is that you will feel the question does not warrant answering this plethora of questions and makes you give up.

If you are really persistent sometimes, after 20 minutes, you may actually reach a human being – a real person who can actually talk (but not answer!). She listens to you patiently and says – “Can you please hold on – I need to transfer you to a different department who can address this issue”. So while you hear out their advertisements and repetitive jingles, intercepted with a message, which says that you should not hang up and that your call is important to them, you get on to another person after 20 minutes, she hears you out and says, “I have presently no information on your query (they never say – “I don’t know”). I shall raise a ticket and you will hear about it within 120 hours”. You cannot go back to them, until then though your query may be critical to get an answer before 120 hours.

The call center executives are trained to answer people with sand in their mouths. They are trained not to understand that there are actual people who need something and need it badly.

There were days when I entered the bank, the officer used to greet me and say, “Sir, your credit has arrived and you can enjoy it”. Now when I log into my account – it says,
”There has been a technical error and we shall let you know when you can access your account within 72 hours”.

The unknown loss to the industry is that there is loss of people knowledge. Service Industry people are no longer expected to know their clients; know them and greet them when they come into their lives for a very short time.

That’s an irreversible change and we need to accept the change and move ahead.