Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Call Centers Tricks

Having a call center is important for every corporate. But are the call centers, customer cares or support desk becoming successful in actually solving the problems of customers. Recent interaction with an reputed Telecoms operator brought in front of me different ways/tricks which these call centers use to hide incompetence's. These call centers are acting as levels of shields which dont allow customers to get transparency and problem solved. They have range of tricks which are..

Trick 1: If your existing ticket is not solved till dead line, they might raise new ticket and buy time.
Trick 2: When you call the call centre they might put you on hold endlessly asking you that they are transferring to different department.

Trick 3: If you wish to speak to senior or manager they might transfer to some of their colleagues, i guess, who acts as senior.
Trick 4: They give phone number of nodal officer which is always switched off or engaged.
Trick 5: They give you time by when the problem will get solved and then without solving the problem, i guess, make a confirmation call saying problem is resolved.
Trick 6: If they are supposed to call you, they will give 2-3, i guess, missed calls and before you pick up disconnect the call. Later they say we tried to call you.
Trick 7: Will divert your phone to other state call center. Eg: Punjab or any other state.
Trick 8: They will hardly revel a facility like nodal officer email id. Even if you contact Nodal officer he will take sweet 5 days to reply.
Trick 9: If at all phone gets transferred to so called manager, he will give promise to solve the problem- but in 15 days.
Trick 10: They never give the phone number of the technical person who is actually going to solve the problem.
Trick 11: When a ticket is raised a completion deadline is given as 3 working days. However they dint seam to do any thing till the last minute and when the deadline is passed they ask for 2-3 additional days.
Trick 12: They close the ticket very often saying that there is INCOMPLETE INFORMATION. They wont even inform you about the closure.
Trick 13: The phone can be diverted in various department like GPRS, network, technical or customer care.
Trick 14: They will make a call asking you when are you at home for a technical person to visit at home personally. Obviously, most of us will not be at home on working days and the technical person will never have to visit your house.
Trick 15: They anyways have to auto option to auto cancel a phone number when he calls call center for 5-6 hours.
Trick 16: It is also common to suggest useless solutions and close the ticket. Like handset problem, simcard problem, restart mobile.
Trick 17: Ask the customer to get in contact through email support with reason given that email support is given more priority. In practical, both have same priority.
Trick 18: If you some how get call from technical department to inform you that the problem is solved, chances are that you will not be able to call back on that number. If some how you are able to call back on that number, they will ask you your mobile number to call you back. But in reality, i guess, they take your phone number and feed it in they local number or note it physically and ensure that they don't pick this phone number.

Words i guess means that me as a customer cannot prove the action but a perception is formed and harm is done about the image of call center.
As you don't have even a single person whom you can catch hold of and with so many options in call centers arsenal, you can only hope that your problem gets solved.


The attitude of people sitting at call centers, i dont know weather its officially taught to them or they themselves have invented it, would promote unnecessary inefficiencies. The technical team would be willing to solve the problem but if the call center guys are used to think that the problem is from customer end, even the genuine problems goes unresolved. I think that the number of employees in technical departments should be good enough to back the actual problems. If not surely business will not be able to scaling to higher limits.

It has to be noted that a single problem solved actually would reduce the N other number of calls as some problems would be faced by many other customers. With recovery in sight its high time to get technical teams on work to solve each problems which customers are facing and be able to scale successfully. Would end it with a funny note that this entry also helps callcenters those who have not yet implemented trick like above and can hence forth use same at their respective areas..

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