Calling a company and reaching a human operator-receptionist these days is about as rare as hitting the Mega-Million. The strange thing is, the companies that are the most likely to let an automated phone operator handle their customer services are usually the ones that take your money, too, including insurers, brokers, banks, credit card companies, appliance service centers and, worst of all, airlines.
That ubiquitous female computerized voice gives you a blizzard of options that match the phone pad buttons. But if you make the mistake of hitting 0, as if that would get you to a real person quicker, she berates you with, “You have made an invalid selection,” and the monotony starts all over again.
The annoying pervasiveness of automated phone operator systems bludgeoned me over the head during the past several weeks as I compiled data for our annual NRN Top 200 census. I never realized before how many foodservice companies depend on these systems, which in my opinion ruin images and service ethics.
I realize how important it is to shave a few dollars off of overhead. An automated operator will never get sick, take vacation or punch in late.
And being in the endangered business of print journalism, no one has to tell me about the ease or economy of scale in directing customers or readers to a website as the first point of contact with a company or publication.
But there has to be a way to integrate these phone systems into the service ethic of a company without it appearing that the caller is an irritant.
For my Top 200 assignments, I had to contact a mix of casual-dining chains, contract feeders, sandwich chains and huge franchisee groups. With the exception of a few, almost all relied on automated phone operators.
One company I had to call is a reasonably well-known sandwich player on the East Coast. Although the computerized voice gave me the option of dialing an extension if I knew it, I had to listen to a listing of every department because there was no personnel directory.
A West Coast casual-dining chain’s phone system required me to reach employees by spelling the entire name, first and last. But if I took too long or made a mistake, I went back to the batter’s box.
And because I didn’t know the extension or name of a person in the corporate office of a certain contract feeder, my message was tossed into an “office general message board” which was picked up at the end of the day. How efficient is that?
What’s really scary is some of these companies were franchisors. Imagine a prospective franchisee hearing, “Hi, this is Cindy in franchise sales. Leave a message.” Is that truly better than reaching a human?
Technology is a change agent, but not all change agents are good.