Twenty years ago, I worked as a customer service rep for SONY Electronics. Every day, I would handle about 100 calls, usually from customers upset that their products had stopped working. Without question, the most irascible were the camcorder owners, especially those whose kids' birthdays were next weekend. (Yes, this was pre-smartphone.)
I was a decent rep. Some were better; others were worse. Sometimes my manager would pull me aside and make me listen to one of my less-than-stellar calls. She gave me specific feedback on how I could have handled the situation better, but this was only after the fact. That is, with the exception of her dialing in to the call, there was no real-time way of coaching me or anyone else for that matter.
Of course, it's no longer 1994. Thanks to the decline in storage costs and advances in machine learning, that's all changing. Case in point, I recently read the article Here’s What Happens to Calls ‘Recorded for Quality Assurance’ at AT&T. From the piece:
Ever wonder if anyone is listening to your customer service complaints? At AT&T, the answer might surprise you.
The telecom giant is currently experimenting with a new software system that transcribes customer calls. Using machine learning, AT&T’s system offers feedback in close to real time to help company reps. The system can even detect customers’ emotion, and it offers an interactive database that employees can query for insights on the kinds of calls they’re getting.
Say AT&T starts getting a bunch of angry calls about service quality from customers in a specific neighborhood. The system can detect those complaints and chart them by location, allowing employees to isolate the problem and quickly brief customers on the situation. It can even anticipate the kinds of questions a customer might ask so reps can be ready with the answers.
The possibilities are limitless, much like geotagging tweets. Capturing immediate customer sentiment—and then acting upon it—shows enormous potential, especially compared to its ex post facto counterpart.
Generally speaking, AT&T may well be truly concerned about its customers, but it's hard to ignore the fact that it's also trying to prevent another Comcast situation. The latter came under intense scrutiny recently when one of its reps (too) zealously tried to retain customer Ryan Block. Unbeknownst to the Comcast rep, Block was recording the call.
Block posted the recording of the call and it quickly went viral.
Whoops.
Simon Says: Embrace the carrot; fear the stick.
One can only imagine how much bad PR Comcast could have avoided if the rep had just used plain old common sense. While technology will never prevent employees making boneheaded moves, the advent of sophisticated technologies can minimize the damage of future catastrophes.
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