Chatting Up the Customer!
-- By Pushpa Sathish, Staff Writer
No more annoying music while you’re on hold, no more waiting for a day or two for a reply to your email, and no endless conversations with machines before you get someone human on the line. Instant messaging windows and online chat are moving from the realms of social networking sites into the business world, and from the look of things, emerging a success. Microsoft, HP, Cingular, Verizon Communications, Comcast – these are a just a few companies that are turning to live chat to address customer needs more effectively.
Regional support manager at Comcast, Ricky Frazier Jr., uses the words “instant gratification” to describe in a nutshell the positive aspects of customer chats, a description that made me smile, not because I found it funny, but because I know people (including myself) who would like to replace the gratification with frustration.
While I am not denying the pros of live chat, there are a few drawbacks to this method of providing customer service:
- Agents are sometimes taught to use a pre-written script, as a result of which they are sometimes clueless to the answers to your questions. I once had the (dis)pleasure of talking to one who insisted I downgrade to IE 6 from IE 7 for the trouble-shooting procedure to work, without offering any explanations as to why the downgrade was necessary. I finally figured out that he was reading from and sticking to an ironclad script.
- Some agents multi-task, i.e., they talk to more than one customer at the same time. While this may seem like a good thing from the company’s, and the agent’s points of view, customers are often short-changed in the service they receive. The flow in conversations is often lost in the switching between different windows, with the focus not staying on one customer alone.
- The level of customer satisfaction from the interaction depends on the efficiency of the agent you get on line. Writing down instructions takes more skill than talking a customer through a problem.
- And last but certainly not the least, God help you if your connection is reset in the middle of a conversation - you cannot continue the session with the same agent; another takes over, and it’s back to square one.