MNteractive.com

No one likes to be a customer service phone representative. You typically have to deal with the irate, the rude, and just plain tired folks. It’s a thankless job.

And few customers like to deal with the phone bank either. Long waits on hold, getting passed from person to person, etc.

At work, I’m the main contact for email complaints and questions that come in. On slower days, I’m often able to respond to emails as they come in in real time. Surprisingly, more often than not, I get follow up responses in real time as well. Which leads me to wonder why companies don’t replace large chunks of their phone support staff with email staff or online chat.

Some do, of course. I’ve seen the rare company actually have a live chat box (Landsend.com being an example of great live chat support). And the odd tech company can be amazingly responsive to their email (xstandard.com being an example of great email support).

However, par for the course tends to be me sending an email, getting an automated “we value you as a customer so much that we’re sending you this generic and useless reply letting you know that we’ll maybe get back to you in a day or so” and then waiting patiently for that reply, sending my reply, waiting another day, and so forth.

So, to all you companies with overworked phone support folks: take just a dozen of them and move them over to live email/chat support. They’ll likely be happier (no one screaming at them), more productive (they can handle multiple queries at once), easier to track (email makes for great archiving) and I bet you’ll make some of your customers very happy.