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Archive for the ‘Call Centers’ Category

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TD Bank Redemption!

Posted by Ted Hopton on October 22, 2009

checkmarkI need to provide an update on my experience with TD Bank (see, TD Bank Really Stepped In It). Within 24 hours of my deeply frustrating and disappointing experience, I got a phone call from Eric Baker at TD Bank. Now it was the 9th inning of a Phillies playoff game, so I had little interest in talking to him at that moment, but he promised to call back the next day — and he did.

He knew I’d had a bad experience and he promised he could help me. We reviewed what had gone wrong and what I needed, and sure enough, he knew what to do. Pretty soon we had everything set up as it should be, and he’d apologized again and again for the way the call center had handled things. He promised to follow up with the person who had not been able to successfully help me, and make sure she understood the right way to make Quicken work with their website. He gently mentioned that it was Intuit that causes the problem I encountered, but that was almost in passing and he took full responsibility for TD Bank’s not explaining what to do better the first time.

All in all, it was quite a nice save! And 24 hours later, another person from TD Bank called to offer me help, not being aware that Eric had already helped me. Not so organized there, but I’d rather have redundant follow up calls than none. So, I’ve gone back to being a basically content customer. Maybe I’m not so hard to please after all?

Posted in Call Centers, Customer Sat, Customer Service | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

TD Bank Really Stepped In It

Posted by Ted Hopton on October 5, 2009

TD Bank made a real mess when they made massive system changes. I’ve heard about the problems customers are having on the news, and now I find I’m one of them, too.

I used to have an account at Commerce Bank, which I liked. Then Commerce Bank’s president got in trouble, the bank got in trouble, and TD Bank bought Commerce. All was still well until last week, when TD Bank launched an “improved” online banking website.

Now I can’t get Quicken to connect with TD Bank any more. I followed the directions from TD Bank for re-establishing this connection, but what the directions say should happen doesn’t actually work. I’m stuck and can’t find a way around it.

So I called for help, which Commerce always was good at providing. I’ve been on hold for about half-an-hour now. My first call was declined — I was simply told by a recording to try later. Maybe I should have listened, but I want to get my banking done now, not later.

My second (current) call was answered promptly by a functionary who asked the nature of my call. I explained that Quicken won’t work with their online service any more. After 20 minutes on hold, my call was taken by a beleaguered customer service representative who was not familiar with technical details of online services. He needed to transfer me to online services.

Wait, why wasn’t my call sent there in the first place? He had no idea, and he wasn’t interested in hearing my complaints about my time having been wasted. He gave the perfunctory apology, but declined to pass my complaint along to where it could do some good for future callers. “It’s too big a system,” he explained.  He had no idea who to contact or complain to, and just wanted to get me off the line.

So I am still on hold as I write this. Starting to feel like Charlie on the MTA.

UPDATE:

It has been 90 minutes now. My call was finally, clumsily answered after an hour (there was silence for so long I thought they had disconnected me, then there was a fumbling around sound for a few seconds and finally a human voice spoke). I got transferred to the right department after 60 minutes on hold!

And then I felt like the straight man in “Who’s On First” as I tried to explain what keeps happening to me.

It took half an hour to get to her best solution for me, and I rejected it. Turns out TD Bank wants me to delete all my pending transactions that I scheduled on their website (not in Quicken). After I do that, I can follow the rest of their instructions and hope it works this time. And then I get to re-create the transactions that I deleted.

Instead, I created a new account in Quicken, while I was waiting on hold for an hour. And I found it pulled in my pending transactions just fine. The stupid thing is that now I have my data in two separate accounts. But after totally wasting 90 minutes on this exercise, I’d rather settle for that than go through more hoops.

TD Bank has a long, long way to go to convince me that I want to remain as their customer.

Posted in Call Centers, Customer Sat, Customer Service | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

One Blog or Specialized Blogs?

Posted by Ted Hopton on July 19, 2008

I started this blog just to get started blogging. I had wanted to blog for years, but one thing after another held me back, not the least of which was fear that I would not keep up with it. Blogs that aren’t updated regularly aren’t really blogs, IMHO. I didn’t want to set something up that I could not commit to and write in frequently.

So, one decision I made was to let this blog include any and all content I felt like blogging about. I know people who have different blogs for different kinds of content. That makes sense, and if you’re trying to build traffic to your blog it’s probably best to be targeted in what you write about, so readers interested in that content will find your blog valuable.

But I’m not doing this for the website traffic and I couldn’t commit to keeping up with more than one blogs, such as one about work topics and one about things of personal interest to me. So I made this blog a blend that reflects all of me — all of my interests, whether professional or personal, the serious and the silly, the carefully considered and the random tidbits. I’ve decided I like it this way.

Now, my career has changed direction and blogging is suddenly part of my official job, Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Blogs, Call Centers, Career, Social Media | Leave a Comment »

Moving is Fun . . . and Comcast Loses Then Wins

Posted by Ted Hopton on June 18, 2008

Sorry I have been away from this blog for a while. I just moved, and the fun still has not stopped. Boxes are piled everywhere, the kitchen is not unpacked at all, and heck if I know where the towels and washclothes are. I’ll be back after I dig out.

But, I should comment on Comcast, both the good news and the bad. First, the bad news: even though I told the customer service rep when I called to tell them I was moving that every time in the past when I have moved Comcast has screwed things up, and even though he assured me he had taken care of everything for me this time . . . you guessed it, it got screwed up. I waited two hours when I had far better things to do, and Comcast never showed up to set up my service.

So, I called, navigated my way through their annoying and illogical IVR Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Call Centers, Customer Sat, Customer Service, Human Interest | Leave a Comment »

Should you fire the voice mail guy?

Posted by Ted Hopton on June 10, 2008

Seth Godin hits the nail on the head, again, in this blog post.

Let’s say the person in charge of your retail operations does the following every single day:

  • Puts up a sign indicating which of five doors customers should use.
  • Locks that door.
  • Randomly unlocks another door.
  • When someone figures out which door to use, he runs out and kicks them in the groin, then locks the door.

read more | digg story

Posted in Call Center Management, Call Centers, Customer Sat, Customer Service | Leave a Comment »

CMI: Getting a Real Measure on Satisfaction

Posted by Ted Hopton on May 29, 2008

CMIHow did I miss posting about these great articles by Jay Minnucci? I went to link to them from the post I just wrote about Dr. Jodie Monger’s article on survey malpractice and that’s when I discovered I never wrote about them. They were both published in ICMI’s Customer Management Insight (CMI): Getting a Real Measure on Satisfaction (Part I) and Getting a Real Measure on Satisfaction (Part II).

Well, now I am! I loved this two-part series Jay did so much that I asked him to do a presentation on this topic at ICMI’s Dallas Call Center Demo and Conference last week. I think the live session was even better than the articles, because of the audience participation and the dialogue that took place, and just because Jay’s a fun and professional speaker.

These articles make an excellent companion to Jodie Monger’s article that I just wrote about, Are You Guilty of Survey Malpractice? She delves into the details of survey practices and Jay uncovers a whole lot of other factors that you’ve likely never considered.

Surveys alone do not reflect true customer satisfaction levels. Behavioral metrics hold the key to managing dissatisfaction.

I love the way Jay pussy-foots around touchy issues so delicately, as he does here: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Call Center Management, Call Centers, Customer Sat, Customer Service, ICMI, ICMI Conferences, ICMI's CMI | Leave a Comment »

CMI: Are You Guilty of Survey Malpractice?

Posted by Ted Hopton on May 29, 2008

CMIDr. Jodie Monger knows surveys, and in this Customer Management Insight (CMI) article,  “Are You Guilty of Survey Malpractice?,” she explains what NOT to do on your customer satisfaction surveys.

Measurement programs must meet certain scientific criteria to be statistically valid with an acceptable confidence level and level of precision or tolerated error. Without these considerations, you are guilty of Survey Malpractice. To defend your program with “it has always been this way” or “we were told to do a survey” is not sufficient. Research laws adhered to in academia apply to the business world. A deficient survey yields inaccurate data and results in invalid conclusions no matter who conducts it.

How hard is it to come up with a bunch of questions and create a survey? That’s what most of us think, and if you just want some quick and informal feedback, that’s fine. But your customer satisfaction measurements are another story altogether. Jodie explains seven warning signs of “survey malpractice”:

  1. Measuring too many things
  2. Not measuring enough things
  3. Measuring questions with an unreliable scale
  4. Measuring the wrong things or the right things the wrong way
  5. Asking for an evaluation after memory has degraded
  6. Accuracy and credibility of service providers and product vendors
  7. Wiggle room via correction factors

(See the article for the explanation associated with each.)

Posted in Call Center Management, Call Centers, Customer Sat, ICMI, ICMI's CMI | Leave a Comment »

CMI: First Contact Resolution Unraveled

Posted by Ted Hopton on May 29, 2008

CMIHere’s more on the topic of First Contact Resolution (aka, First Call Resolution or FCR) in ICMI’s Customer Management Insight (CMI): FCR Unraveled: Getting to the Heart of First-Contact Resolution. It’s an important and complex topic, so the more insight the better, and Greg Levin lays out the issues clearly.

Few performance metrics are as critical to contact center success as first-contact resolution (FCR); unfortunately, few performance metrics are also as misunderstood.

As I’ve already written (First Call Resolution: Great Principle, Hard to Apply), FCR is simple to grasp but far from simple to put into place in a meaningful way. As Greg put it: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Call Center Management, Call Centers, Customer Sat, ICMI, ICMI's CMI | Leave a Comment »

More of the Same Griping about Customer Service

Posted by Ted Hopton on May 26, 2008

Nothing new at all in this NYT article, “Far From Always Being Right, the Customer Is on Hold.” It’s designed for popular consumption and it rehashes points made better elsewhere, with this author’s distinction being a decidedly whiny tone. But it’s the kind of article my mother notices and points out to me, knowing I work with call centers for a living. Thanks, Mom, I found it . . .

The bottom line, as I have said many times before (see, for example, Just Answer the Phone Quicker!) and will say many times again, is that those of us in the call center industry have the power to change the negative perception the public has of us. It’s going to take resolve and determination, and recognition that customer service is important enough to do right that spending money on it is a wise investment.

Posted in Call Center Management, Call Centers, Customer Sat, Customer Service | Leave a Comment »

CMI: Secrets of Recruiting Success

Posted by Ted Hopton on April 29, 2008

Good insights on recruiting for call centers:

Successful recruiting programs prioritize the quality of recruits over the sheer speed or numbers of applicants. Practices such as rebranding your agents’ job and using employee referrals are proven methods for attracting quality applicants.

read more | digg story

Posted in Call Center Management | Leave a Comment »

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