There’s almost always fierce competition for graves, too. People WANT that shift and work it well. Just because people are awake at night doesn’t mean they won’t or can’t provide reasonable customer service. And frankly, it’s insulting and unfair to say otherwise. The only downside of calling during overnight hours, typically, is that often OTHER departments aren’t there, so you may not have the full scope of service (for instance, you might have access to basic technical support, but not advanced; if you’ve had a problem with a face-to-face technician, you’ll have to wait until “normal hours” to talk to dispatch; things like that.) However, nearly every person I’ve worked with has been happy to do everything that was personally within their power to help–and at the call center I worked in, we actually had a bit more power than day shift folks because of the nature of our hours.

Neil
Dell, Inc.
neil@dell.com

Fine, so I called the sales support. Just an answering machine with nobody to answer my specific questions. That’s when I realized that Dell has really gone downhill and I won’t be purchasing from them again.

Shame – they use to have such good deals.

Bob responds: I don’t know that I’d fault any company for not answering the phone at 1 am; I’d be willing to wait until business hours for quality customer service. For example, Falcon Northwest prides themselves in not having customer service at odd hours, and their reasoning is hard to fault: what kind of people are willing to work the graveyard shift? Since Falcon built their business on gamers (they do sell business machines now, folks — hint!) they certainly have more reason than most to be open 24 hours for support, but they choose to pick their battles and do a good job during expanded daytime business hours.

My experience with Falcon tech support has been stellar compared to Dell. I won’t give Falcon an A plus, because there is still a bit of a tendency to make you go through a lot of diagnostic “hoops” before they are allowed to send you the replacement part you clearly need, and they can be slow to return calls at times; but it is light-years beyond what Dell has become in recent years, that’s safe to say! And by gosh, they *do* return calls!

Bob responds: I have no first-hand knowledge of CRM software typically used in telephone customer support scenarios, but have absolutely no difficulty believing that CRM software purchased by such operations has responded to the buyer’s desires. Customer support centers generally have a misguided desire to turn customer support people into thoughtless monkeys. Actually I doubt they think of it in those terms, but that’s the net effect. If you want to see how call centers should work, I highly recommend the QA Q&A blog. If you’re managing customer service, go there, and get wisdom!

’nuff said.

Bob responds: As much as I think outsourcing (especially, offshoring) is generally a Very Bad Idea, it isn’t that it’s inherently impossible for it to work, at least as level one support, if it’s properly structured and managed. It’s just that in the real world, it isn’t usually properly structured and managed, as you can see here. It’s clear from this transcript that elaborate effort has been expended to train representatives to spout soothing phrases in response to certain stimuli, but absolutely no effort has been made to give them an actual understanding of their task; it is very much a cookbook / decision tree approach. In this case the goal is not to LISTEN and SATISFY THE CUSTOMER; it’s to quickly pigeon-hole the customer complaint, respond with the closest parroted answer in their play book, rinse and repeat. Also, in my personal experience, even when the rep is willing and able to understand the issue and provide actual help, they have very little freedom or authority to do anything useful.