Far From Always Being Right, the Customer Is on Hold

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Switchboard operators at the Empire State Building in 1946. Today, voice response systems are the vogue.

REMEMBER the days when, if something went wrong with a product you ordered, you picked up the phone and there was a live person on the other end? Wait, there is more. You asked for customer service and were transferred — to another human! And that person perhaps even solved your problem.

I get a warm feeling when I think about that, like fondly remembering an old teacher. We have become so used to the impersonal and baffling labyrinth of automated voice systems at just about every company — and then poor customer service when we do reach an actual person — that we just grudgingly accept it.

We all have bad service stories and love telling them and they do not always involve giant corporations. One of my favorites is about the dry cleaner who returned two of my husband’s shirts with neatly torn holes in each right sleeve. Clearly, they had gotten caught on a machine.

He showed the clerk the holes and asked for replacement shirts. But she insisted that he must be rubbing his elbows so hard on his desk that the shirts wore through. Never mind that we had been going there for years with no such problem. Never mind that they were symmetrical tears.

She did offer to make good, though. She would turn them into short-sleeve shirts for him — at a price. We switched dry cleaners.

But most of my negative experiences involve trying to get help over the phone, whether for an insurance or an Internet problem. I dutifully push the buttons required or speak to the automated voice, and still I often end up at the wrong department or get disconnected. If the problem is not resolved the first time, I have to go through the process with a different agent.

Complaining about bad customer service is such a sport now that it should be an Olympic event. But I am curious about how it devolved into this, if there is anything I can do about it and if it is ever going to change.

A little history: These interactive voice response systems, known as I.V.R., which recognize speech or touch tones, began in earnest in the 1980s, and the idea was that they would cut costs by reducing the number of people a company needed to respond to customer complaints.

The trouble is, companies were more interested in saving money than customer retention.

“ ‘The customer is always right’ got totally lost,” said Michael Schrider, president of J. Lodge, a call-monitoring business (as in “this call is monitored for quality assurance.”). “It was ‘the customer is a pain.’ ”

About nine years ago, call centers started moving offshore, so that when you called about your computer, you did not know if you were talking to someone in Bangalore or Boston.

Despite common perceptions, however, fewer than 10 percent of call centers are based outside the United States. There are some 100,000 call centers located in this country, said Jon Anton, director of benchmark research at the Center for Customer Driven Quality at Purdue. The number does not include telemarketers.

But whether here or overseas, few of the systems seem to work very well, and the result is customer alienation.

Walter Rolandi is founder of the Voice User Interface Company, which designs and assesses interactive voice response systems for companies. As part of his job, he hears how people use the systems.

“I’ve listened to thousands of people interacting with machines,” Mr. Rolandi said. “You hear sighs of resignation. You hear people swear. If businesses knew what I knew, they would not design them this way. Many people do not take into account the emotional state of the customer. When you call someone for customer service, you’ve got a problem and you’re probably in a bad mood. You hear someone telling you your call is so important that we won’t let you talk to a human. Then they slap people with too many options, and eventually, you’re in a fight with the system. When you do get a customer representative, you’re loaded for bear.”

In general, Mr. Rolandi said, if people can use an automated system in less time than it takes to deal with a human, they will. Who would rather wait in a bank line than use an A.T.M.? And I love the automated prescription refill system at my CVS drugstore. But it is much more difficult when the request is not as straightforward.

John I. Todor, a psychologist and author of the book “Addicted Customers” (Silverado Press, 2007), said that in this fast-paced, complicated world, people were already being pushed out of their psychological comfort zones.

“A lot of people out there already have a hair trigger,” he said. And poor customer service makes us more frustrated and anxious, which increases our distrust of the company.

But things have started changing, for a number of reasons. For one, companies discovered that customer turnover was expensive.

For the first time, American corporations are acknowledging “customer service as something worth paying for rather than just red ink,” said Mr. Anton, who looks at call centers worldwide and, using a number of criteria, compares how well they work. “If you can satisfy customers and keep them buying, it’s as important as marketing.”

He said that in the last year or so some large companies have been creating a chief customer executive, whose success is measured not on profit, but on customer retention.

Another reason for this change is that the very technology that is driving us crazy is helping people fight back.

Consumers are posting their experiences with customer service online and warning people away from businesses that do not offer a good follow-up with customers. Secondly, there are Web sites that tell customers how to get around an automated system.

Two of them are www.gethuman.com and www.dialahuman.com. I tried a few of the numbers posted and some went through easier than others. Nonetheless, they are helpful.

And gethuman.com, in particular, provides a community for consumers to exchange information. Walt Tetschner, the director of the Get Human Web site, is an engineer by trade and now a consumer advocate. The Web site has been up for about two and a half years and has 10,000 visitors a day.

In May, the site also began asking visitors to rank those companies with great customer service. It then lists them on its Web site.

Mr. Schrider said that he would like to see companies have a real person answer the phones and then prioritize the calls, but businesses do not want that for at least two reasons: It would be more costly, and they think that most customers do not like to call in and then get transferred.

Why not at least give more control to the consumer, Mr. Todor suggested, by offering an option upfront to speak to an agent or continue with the automated system? If it will take 10 minutes to speak to a person, then the caller can decide whether to wait, without going through the entire automation system.

Netflix, the movie rental company, for example, last year moved from an e-mail customer service system to giving its subscribers a 24-hour phone number with a live agent. When I called, I got an automated system telling me that someone would be available within three minutes — and sure enough, I was soon talking to a real person.

Mr. Anton said other companies were also recognizing and responding to that desire by using an automated service that in natural language asks the caller initially, “How can I help you?” If the system does not understand what you say, there will be a human guide behind who can direct the call.

Why not just have a person initially? Because an automated system can handle four to five calls at a time while a person can handle only one.

“If you can lose callers over a bad call, you can increase loyalty with a good call,” Mr. Anton said.

So if things get so good, we will not have to spend our time wading through endless automated phone systems. Or indulging in long stories about bad customer service.

Life will seem so empty.

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