I have an idea
it would transform customer service entirely
What’s up, my beloved data points?
This week had a truly unexpected bright moment and it happened while I was on the phone with the second customer service rep at my very small and kind of quirky business bank.
(Backstory? I needed the answer to a simple policy question that wasn’t posted on the bank’s website so I called and 25 minutes of hold time later I got a woman who went through the checklist to access my account even though I said it had nothing to do with my account, and then went through a second checklist to see if I would be a legal representative for the account, and by the time all the vetting was done my Tuesday morning Zoom was about to start so I had to apologize and hang up before I even got to ask my question.)
I called back after my Zoom and got a rep who was willing to listen to the question, answered it, and then I was thanking him and I came up with an idea and the rep and I talked about it for five minutes—how it would improve his life and the state of customer service in general—and how easily it could be implemented and how it would also improve the user/client experience. And here’s the idea.
What if, instead of a “customer satisfaction survey” which is long and stupid and on a ten-point scale (and by the way, FYI, at most companies according to this guy who has worked more than one phone in his life, any number below an 8 is considered disciplinary failure and leads to consequences. God forbid the rep is having a bad day and gets a difficult client and barely manages to get through the call and the client gives them a 7—or even worse, the client is angry with the company or the technology and not the representative and gives straight 1s and then writes “but the customer service rep was wonderful despite all these problems”—I am frequently guilty of this — it turns out this still hurt the rep! who knew?)…..
What if instead of all that jazz, there were two questions:
after this call, do you like the company more, less, or the same?
should this customer service rep get a raise, keep their same pay, or be docked?
And what if IN REAL TIME this vetted voice-printed client call (so that you couldn’t get bots to call in or ask your friend Bob to make a series of calls with fake accents) actually changed the pay of the representative.
Wouldn’t that be cool? It could be a microfraction of a penny difference, but over time a good customer service rep would be rewarded and a bad one would be penalized and there would be no bias over a large statistical period of time. It’s not one person or someone analyzing data. It is immediate response after a period of time with the person - you could even connect it to the amount of time they spent on the phone in some kind of formula depending if you want the reps to get through a lot of people or give in-depth service.
Thoughts?
Writing news:
In case you usually sit around waiting for your nails to dry on Tuesday nights, the first Pen Parentis Literary Salon is coming up on September 12th at 7pm ET — tune in as my guest! Just click “friend” and you get a free ticket. I co-host these every month, in case you don’t know and I’d love to interact with you online! Here’s the link.
Also don’t forget - I’m doing a reading from A FLASH OF DARKNESS with Lucy Sante and Mark Jacobson at Catherine Texier’s private LES loft Friday Sept 15 and you’re invited (there is no RSVP, just show up - it will remind you of movies of the cool 1970s art scene):
Music performed by Madelyn Monaghan and Caleb Adams
Doors open at 7 PM. Readings and music start at 8 PM
Food and wine will be served
255 east 7th street – Between Ave. C and D
Intercom 5 – 4th floor
I can’t wait. See you there.
Random Final Thought:
Was out to lunch with a longtime friend who is rarely out to lunch and she mused that “spendthrift” is a very weird word. I agreed. So we looked it up and the word “thrift” once meant prosperity (see: dust, strike, inflammable…. words that are their own opposites are called contranyms if anyone’s wondering) so the word spend-thrift means one who spends their prosperity.
That’s all she wrote, folks!
contranyms! I never heard of that - thank you!