Pick Up the Darned Phone
In March, Pamela Paul at the New York Times wrote what sadly may not be a minority opinion: “Nobody calls me anymore — and that’s just fine.”
Certainly it seems as if decision-makers at companies which deal directly with the public are heading in that direction, with what I believe could be serious long-term consequences for the bottom line. Recently, Consumer Reports found that 71 percent of people they surveyed “were extremely irritated when they couldn’t reach a human on the phone. Sixty-seven percent said they hung up the phone without getting their issue resolved.” Those percentages have to be low. Further, “‘There’s a feeling on the part of Americans that companies are deliberately making it difficult for them by burying phone numbers, sidestepping calls and steering customers to online FAQs instead of live human beings,’ said Tod Marks, senior project editor.” You don’t say? It’s not a feeling, Tod. It’s a fact.
Of course I recognize that there’s a cost to babysitting lazy customers who could have found answers in a minute or two on their own. But there’s also a loyalty-building aspect to serving a sincere but ignorant customer and solving their problems. Too many companies have decided to shut such people out completely. As a result, many people have no idea how to leverage a great deal of the technology and knowledge which is right there at their fingertips. The economic cost of such ignorance cannot be small.
So pick up the darned phone. Answer the darned phone. And just for the heck of it every once in a while (I know this will be a real toughie), stop sitting, which after all is supposedly as dangerous as smoking, get out of your chair, walk a few feet, and have a conversation with your coworker. Y’know, face to face.
I’m not alone in my productivity-related concerns. During July 2009, East Valley OB/GYN in Chandler, Arizona, banned internal emails during “Conversation Fridays,” calling it “an opportunity for us to refrain from internal emails and pick up the phone to talk to one another to get our jobs done.” Imagine that. I have confirmed (by phone, of course) that Conversation Fridays also took place last year. The practice claims: “Many companies have established programs like this as a way to synergize including VeriSign, US Cellular, and others.”
In 2003, British company Phones4U went much further, completely banning staff email. I don’t know whether the ban is still in place, and perhaps it was an overreaction, but owner John Caudwell claimed that the ban would “save staff up to three hours a day which translates to a saving of £1m (about $1.65 million at the time) a month.”
Techies may ridicule these companies as Neanderthals, but one thing is true about both which is not true of everyone: they’re still in business.
I would hope that President Obama might heed my call for increased efficiency through judicious use of the telephone and face-to-face contact. Unfortunately, I don’t think anyone will be able to pry the Blackberry from his cold, detached, indifferent hands.
Is it me or is it deja-vu all over again?! How many times and how many ways can we say it?! The only way to improve the economy is to lower taxes, cut spending, shrink the size and scope of government and rescind regulatory legislation. In other words leave the private citizen and private sector the hell alone.
These people will never do it because it would be tacit admission that their policies and their entire weltanschauung are completely wrong and have been since time immemorial. You cannot reason with blind ideology no matter how much evidence and logic you throw at it.
Ain’t happening.
+1
As long as incompetent but well-papered ivy-league-rs keep getting elected and/or installed in our government, this will continue. I have always agreed that an educated and experienced person far outweighs the credibility of someone who is either just one or the other. But still, it’s not always the perfect solution. But having a wall full of sheepskins simply tells me that the owner of those documents probably spent too much time in school and not enough at work. That is, unless they are the type of person who not only had a job but a family and additional responsibilities as well, then they have my support. But people who are like O’Bama, (he’s Irish, y’know) and his cabinet who have a collective six to eight weeks of total private sector experience, well, then….no, I don’t support them.
Well, I think there are two separate issues here. Yes, it would be SO nice to actually get a human on the phone when calling a doctor’s office, a bank, or (God forbid) an actual Customer Service number for either an electronic product or some public utility, like the phone or electric company. You spend about 15 minutes trying to find the right department to go to with an automated system at the electric company, when a human being could have answered your problem in a minute or two. With my gas and electric company, I don’t think you can even talk to a real person. You can only leave messages on an automated system and “Someone will get back to you” in a day or two. The only time they really want to hear from you is if you have a gas leak. So, unless you’re about to blow up, they’ll talk to you. Everything else can wait, and wait, and wait.
As for e-mails with co-workers, that may not actually be a bad thing. Sometimes it’s hard enough to be with the people you work with, let alone have to make pleasant chit-chat with them. But a real down side is that now you have to manage a ton of e-mails, many of which you’ll never need but you’d better save because you never know when you’ll have to produce them again. So e-mails now have turned our workforce into an even more paranoid group of people. Individuals were already afraid of their boss, of their job security, or of their co-workers. Now they have to add to their list possible litigation, where every e-mail is a possible piece of evidence for some future trial. And people wonder why they hate going to work these days.
Yes, it would be SO nice to actually get a human on the phone when calling a doctor’s office, a bank, or (God forbid) an actual Customer Service number for either an electronic product or some public utility, like the phone or electric company. You spend about 15 minutes trying to find the right department to go to with an automated system at the electric company, when a human being could have answered your problem in a minute or two. With my gas and electric company, I don’t think you can even talk to a real person. You can only leave messages on an automated system and “Someone will get back to you” in a day or two. The only time they really want to hear from you is if you have a gas leak. So, unless you’re about to blow up, they’ll talk to you. Everything else can wait, and wait, and wait.
I think you may be amused – and maybe a little terrified – with this article by Theodore Dalrymple recounting his experience when he left a cell phone at his bank branch and tried to call the bank to get it back: http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon2007-01-06td.html
I’ll share an anecdote of my own about customer service. Several years back, I had some concerns about the water quality in the city water supply because one of my cats was showing trace amounts of something that shouldn’t have been in a blood test. I called the city government, navigated their phone system, and managed to find a department charged with water quality. I was transferred to the responsible person’s phone line. However, no one picked up and after a few rings, I was advised that I was being transferred to that person’s voice mail. Then, after a pause, I was advised that the person’s voice mail inbox was completely full and no more messages could be accepted. I was advised to try again at a later time. I tried again a couple of times a few days later and then a week or two later and invariably got the “inbox full” message. I realized that my odds of even being able to leave a message, let alone getting a reply, were getting very remote. Then I had an idea: the automated message indicated the name of the person whose inbox I was trying to reach and, luckily, the name didn’t have many alternate spellings, so I decided to google the name and see if I could find any other contact information. I soon had an email address and sent him an email that finally contained my original question. That was several years ago and I still have not heard from this individual. (My cats are still alive and well so the water supply apparently wasn’t the issue after all.)
Still, I’m very concerned that a taxpaying citizen can’t reach a relevant employee of his city government because that employee can simply decline to empty his voicemail inbox enough for new messages to be left and can also ignore his email inbox as long as he likes with apparent impunity. It appears that work avoidance, rather than work completion, is the objective of at least one of our city employees – and he’s awfully darned good at it!
Just a short suggestion Tom.
Un-Bold links to external sources.
Reduce the number of links in one article down to two or three at most.
Better yet do away with them completely; use a source / reference list at the end of the article.
Links interrupt the reader’s train of thought. In turn that subtracts from their ability to comprehend, then retain whatever message or point you’re trying to convey.
Each link is an open invitation for the reader to leave what you are saying and not come back.
I, uhm well. Erm, I agree. Not with anything you have to say about the present economic conditions, but in a service economy it should be somewhat painstakingly obvious that businesses should provide, good service.
I was recently working with a mid-level brokerage outside of New York where we spent the time to go on-site, talk to the client face to face and address their needs. Few larger companies could be bothered to do this. There is a benefit in that clients usually communicate specific rather than systemic issues in emails. The client was grateful, we cemented a better working relationship and met some nice people.
Unfortunately you still have to deal with the “gotcha” types who cc a hundred people and request read receipts for every email. I’ve found the people who play these games are often lazy and prefer to spew emails instead of doing actual work. Funny that.
Look, if companies are insisting on emails in order to document how innocent they are should anything end up being litigated, then I wouldn’t worry much about phone calls and face-to-face conversation becoming obsolete. After all, the obvious next step is for people in authority to send emails saying, in effect, “i won’t authorize this, don”t do it.” and then whispering in the hallway to the recipient of that email, “Go ahead, do it, but be sure to report in person — don’t send any more emails on this.” Employees being whispered to this way may realize that if the whispered activities become public they are being set up to take the fall — but with so many desperate for any sort of job, there may be little choice but to play along with the boss’s true desires.
“Dimitry? Hello? Could you turn down the music a little, Dimitry?…”
The thing about e-mail is both the sender and the receiver can deal with it on their own timeline, whereas with a phone call, the expectation is that you need to drop whatever you’re currently doing and deal immediately with this new issue from the other end of your ringing phone. I *hate* it when I’m at the pharmacy to pick up something and I have to wait for the pharmacist to deal with someone on the phone. Or actually any time I’m dealing with a customer service situation (like in a restaurant) and they have to break off from my request or question and answer the damned phone. I think that phone calls have a “jumping to the head of the line” impact that can come across as both annoying and rude.
Also, if you’re dealing with someone in Europe or even coast-to-coast in continental America, e-mail is the better way to do it because you don’t have to coordinate times and figure out when that person will be there to pick up the phone, or when it’s 3:00 in the morning and there’s a good reason why they’re not answering.
In my experience, if you’re getting a full voice-mail box or someone who never, ever, answers their phone, escalating your request first to their supervisor, and then to the Chairman of the Board (or whoever else’s name you can find by Googling that entity) can be remarkably efficacious. And it’s pretty simple to find out that information with a little internet research.
Really, transferring all calls to across the ocean to some chirpy someone in India who refers to all requests as “no problem” cannot be any more beneficial than sending an e-mail, or as a final end-run, a paper letter to the company’s owner, President, or CEO. Just because you have an issue with water quality doesn’t mean it needs to be resolved that very instant, but that a paper letter may very well accomplish what you set out to do.
I always think how the country managed to stagger along after Lincoln’s assassination, in happy ignorance that its President was dead. And how much of what we do really really needs the instant gratification of an immediate response.
And when I was growing up, everyone— probably the author of this piece included– was whining and moaning about how nobody WROTE each other anymore, that we were all spending too much time on the phone…. and care to place a bet on the last time Blumer kicked a hissy about people being on the cell phone all the time? It seems that the more we communicate with each other, the worse wrinkly old worn-out people HATE it.
Geezers. You just can’t get ‘em to live in the same century as everyone else.
Re read the article, kid. It’s about people NOT communicating, or making sure they are not bothered by someone trying to tell them something that might mean they have to do something.
As a card carrying member of the “the worse wrinkly old worn-out people…Geezers… that can’t get ‘em to live in the same century as everyone else” I would put it this way:
No one wants to endure someone barking every tawdry detail of their personal life in public. Some conversations are so loud, I’ll bet the person on the other end of the call could set the phone down, go stand outside on the porch, and still hear the conversation over the treetops.
Same goes for somebody’s choice of music, as car stereos blast their way through neighborhoods at all hours, (observe; never a geezer behind the wheel) but it takes a measure of self control and consideration to restrain oneself from ITSALLABOUTME, something non-geezer generations aren’t big on…
Generally, the company FAQ is nothing but patting themselves on the back, self praise or information on how to get a job with the company, hardly ever does it have anything results oriented.
I have long contended that the phone trees were intended to save the company money by eliminating most of the phone calls from small customers. The larger customers either learn to navigate the system (often enough using options not mentioned) or they get told the direct lines. Count the times I’ve been so furious when I finally get through that I’m nearly incoherent with rage. Real good customer relations, there.
“Email”? That only works about 2 times in 10, unless I’m one of the main customers or I’m dealing with a small company. Then, there’s the question of whether the person involved is still there, not on vacation, or not at another desk and just ignores the message. Few companies seem to set up the email so it automatically goes to several people or is accessible to several people, and then they can end up “assuming someone else will deal with it”.
I guess you don’t remember the “good old days” before email and the web. I do and they weren’t so great. The phones always rang and you had to hire armies of receptionists and secretaries to manage them. You played “telephone tag” to track down people that you could never get and messages were often lost or garbled. Faxing wasn’t much of an improvement as many were lost or misrouted. Phone calls are often inconvenient and intimely. Then you always had the problem of time zones. Bernie Madoff and others like him refused to use email – and for good reason. Emails are a permanent and nearly infallable record of a message. Messages and letters get lost and no one can remember phone calls but emails are undeniable. That is why crooks and losers hate email because they can’t say “I didn’t get your message”. I don’t trust people who hate email.
Far more irritating are the companies which require information in order to be allowed to send an email. My favorite in terms of dysfunction was the congressman who required an instate zip code in order to send him an email.
My own city government, Denver Colorado deals with the problem differently. They refuse to let the public access a staff directory. When you call the central switchboard, they argue with you about whether you want the office you tell them you want. You can’t get an email out of these people because they don’t have the information.
My own approach to dealing with automated phone systems, which never give you the information you need, is to refuse to play their game. I just dial 0 and say operator until I get answered.