It’s hard to do business in 21st
century America
without encountering a call center. If you’re like me, more often than not this
turns out to be a less-than-satisfactory experience, talking with some company’s
outsourced workforce that is struggling mightily to help you from some foreign
land many time zones away.
In April I had to rebook my son’s air
travel from California to Germany
because of the backlog in the U.S. Passport Services Office (another great
workforce story for another day). I dealt with two airlines: United and
Lufthansa. Amazingly, the United call center was in some distant country, while
the Lufthansa person I connected with was an American based in the U.S.
Although the United representative was courteous, hardworking and ultimately
helpful, the customer experience could hardly match what I received from
Lufthansa, where I could ask more detailed questions and get a superior customer
service experience.
There’s a simple reason for all of
this: Call center work is, unfortunately, viewed as a high-volume, low-skill
activity that can be cheaply outsourced to some foreign workforce. In my view,
this is a shortsighted management approach. It seems to ignore the fact that
customers are likely to remember the personal interaction they had with your
workforce and how well they were served as much as the product your company sold
them. I remember the personalized service I received from Lufthansa, and it
makes me want to use them again in the future. I remember United, an airline I
fly with a lot, only because I was happy that the call center didn’t completely
screw me up.
All too often, businesses that
outsource their call centers forget what their customers expect. That’s why it
is wonderful to read stories like this
one today’s New York Times. It’s about Netflix and
how the online movie rental service made a strategic decision to place its call
center in Portland, Oregon, “shunning other lower-cost places in the
United
States and overseas, because it thought that
Oregonians would present a friendlier voice to its
customers.”
In business, as in many of life’s
endeavors, it’s easy to jump on the bandwagon and just mimic what everyone else
is doing. I tip my hat to the courageous managers and executives at Netflix who
didn’t allow themselves to be stampeded into the outsourcing craze, and instead
are offering something precious—something that customers just can’t get enough
of these days: caring, personal service from someone who really knows what
they’re going through.
Got a comment about outsourcing, customer service or any of
my other posts? Until we get the comment posting function on this blog
operational, send me comments at jhollon@workforce.com.
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