Don’t Try This at Home

By the time one gets to be as old as I am, he has seen a lot of different ways to run a business organization, and some of them are not quite as good as others. I once spent several misery-laden weeks at an inbound-only call center before I found another position at twice the hourly rate. (That should tell you immediately that turnover because of weak pay was one of their problems.) Call center work is very demanding and can carry a lot of stress, especially if you have any latent traces of stage fright or self-doubt, but I’m convinced it doesn’t have to be as ugly as these guys made it. How were they going wrong? Let me count the ways…

The company ran call centers in several countries and their head office was in the Americas but not in the U.S. Their income resulted from providing call center services on a subcontractor basis, and their clients included convenience stores and mail-order merchants

The largest customer at my facility was a telephone company providing high-speed DSL network service to residential computers. That was where I came in. Along with 25 other newbies I got three weeks of classroom training to prepare me to put on a headset and take calls for eight hours. The first danger signal: I was being trained to solve service problems for the client’s Macintosh customers, and the only place I’d ever seen a Mac computer was on TV. The second: they only had one Mac in the whole two-story building, and it wasn’t in the training area. Every computer on the shop floor was running with the same operating system I’m using as I write this: Windows.

This was only a symptom of a much larger problem, though. Nearly everything that was wrong with the place was rooted in one simple fact: the company that hired this call center to be the public face of their business signed a contract that specified the center would be paid a flat rate per call. From everything I’ve seen or heard about the deal it appears there was nothing in the contract that said anything about successful outcomes or happy endings, not even an incentive that paid more for calls in which the subscriber’s problem was satisfactorily resolved.

What would you do if your firm was the beneficiary of such largesse from a client? I’d like to think that you still would do the honorable thing and insist that each conversation was directed toward getting the caller up and running as quickly as possible. I’d also like to think that all the people Bernie Madoff swindled will get their money back. In this case, the center did what most people would have done: they kept records on how many calls per hour each worker was taking and cracked the whip to get them to get off the phone sooner in each case so as to maximize call volume and thus corporate revenue. Remember, “getting off the phone sooner” did not translate into “solving the customer’s problem more quickly or efficiently” because the company got paid the same amount even if the caller was left saying “I’m canceling my service and I’ll never do business with those slimy toads again.”

Do you need proof? A friend of mine who stood it far longer than I did was on thin ice for nearly all of his tenure with that organization because his calls were taking too long. During one counseling session he was told flatly by a manager, “Your job is not to solve the customer’s problem. Your job is to get off the phone as quickly as you can and take another call,” in those words. You can’t get much clearer than that.

So what am I asking you to do? Three things. First, if you land in a situation in which you’re expected to engage in corrupt business practices like that, pretend you’ve already been fired and attack your jobsearch with that same gusto. Second, if you’re in a position to choose goods or services for your organization and sign contracts for them, take a few extra moments to consider all the ramifications of the deal you’re about to cut before you whip out that pen. Most importantly, don’t ever lose sight of the fact that making sure your customers always end up being delighted that they chose to do business with you is the only way to guarantee your paychecks don’t bounce.