I don't know if I agree with either side of the whole Gethuman mess. Both sides make many assumptions. Callers assume the worst in call centers, and call centers assume callers are both dumb and anti-automation.

Here's Frost & Sullivan's Ian Jacobs, writing for Destination CRM:

Gethuman gets it wrong with its very first core principle, which the organization sums up this way: "Humans first--in cases where a human is available, a human should quickly answer the call and determine the caller's need." While this egalitarian vision might sound sensible from a consumer's perspective, companies must be able to prioritize service: The most valuable customers should receive first crack at a knowledgeable live agent; less valuable customers should wait--in other words, stratify customers and provide varying levels of service to them based on their differences. In fact, companies should keep some agent availability in reserve, even if this means that less valuable customers must wait longer or deal with an IVR, due to the possibility that the most valuable customers will call in.

Instead of looking at it from an important customer vs. insignificant customer point of view, why not look at it as a matter of automating the simple and agenting the complex? Customers with simple requests can do it via touch-tone or speech rec IVR. Customers with complex issues can talk to an agent.

I think the answer lies somewhere in between what Paul English and Gethuman are advocating and what Ian Jacobs argues.

Gethuman's platform assumes people know what they need and ought to be able to get it directly. They assume that call centers are out to save money by preventing callers from reaching costly agents.

Ian Jacobs and others may be assuming that callers are reflexibly avoiding automated systems out of bitterness over corporate cost-saving measures.

It's neither. Well-designed systems will give almost all callers what they need, when they need it, with reasonable wait times.

If I call DirecTV to order a movie or a special program, or to change my viewing package, I don't need to talk to a person. An automated speech system will do, and it will do it quickly. If I have a question about my bill, chances are I'll want to talk to an agent, if only for some reassurance, no matter what.

If I call the US Postal Service to find a zip code or check on a package, the IVR will be helpful. If I need to report a mailman who fails to deliver packages and mangles and disappears magazines (yes, true story), I need to speak to an agent.

But if a call center screws this up and frustrates me from the start, no good will come. It's one thing to intelligently route a call to the correct agent or knowledge base item. It's another thing entirely to leave out obvious options like "I have a question about my bill."

Treating us equally well is more important than treating us all equally. We don't all have the same needs, but we all need the same respect.

If those platitudes don't sway all the call center managers out there, there's a threat lurking in the blogosphere that may carry more weight: Please, treat all of us well, because any of us could be a Jeff Jarvis or maybe the girlfriend of Cory Doctorow (a co-editor of Boing Boing, one of the biggest blogs on the Web).

Read Ian Jacobs' article here.

I found a nice illustration of Keith's super-empowered angry customer idea in the whole JetBlue debacle. After sitting in an airplane that was frozen to the runway at JFK on Valentine's Day for 11 hours, angry customer Genevieve started the blog JetBlue Hostage.

She writes:

Obviously I had a bad experience on with Jetblue, compounded by the many elements like my desire to go home, see my family and have a romantic first Valentine’s Day with Charlie. I started this blog because I needed to do SOMETHING.

I'm looking for other hostages of Jet Blue. I don't feel that a round trip ticket is enough compensation for people who were held hostage for 11 hours. I don't believe that 11 hour hostages should be treated the same as 3 hour hostages. I don't believe they apologized enough. I believe in the power of the people and power in numbers.

My editorial in the current issue of Call Center was headlined "Why the Masses are Wrong About IVR." Well, the masses had a lot to say in response.

We're all really excited about the new Apple iPhone. Well, almost all of us. Dan Miller of Opus Research is skeptical:

"I can hardly express how profoundly disappointed I am that this shiny, new thing -– the first must-have product since Nintendo’s Wii -– has less voice processing than Tickle-Me Elmo."

And what of Cingular, the wireless service provider that secured an exclusive deal with Apple?

The good news, observed VocaLabs' CEO Peter Leppik before he corrected himself, is that Apple will be doing all the tech support for the phone, not Cingular. "Apple's decision to support the iPhone itself means that the company is determined to maintain control of the complete customer experience, and make sure the Apple brand keeps its value," He wrote.

If only it were so. As Leppik discovered later, Cingular actually is doing the support. Which makes his point all the more interesting: the Apple brand is golden. Why would Apple let Cingular's erratic customer service to taint it?

Cingular hasn't had the best record in customer service, according to VocaLabs' Sector Pulse reports. It's usually somewhere behind T-Mobile and Verizon, but well ahead of Sprint. The AT&T acquisition has done much to drag it down though.

I'm wondering how the exclusive partnership between Apple and Cingular will play out. I can't imagine happy Verizon and T-Mobile customers will risk losing their satisfactory service (and pay a contract cancellation fee for the priveledge) just to get the newest technology. I know I won't.

As David Pogue explains in his Ultimate iPhone FAQ:

Can it be used with anything but Cingular? –No.
Is it an "unlocked" phone, so I can use it with a carrier other than Cingular? –No.
Will there be a non-Cingular version? –Not within the first two years.
Can I put my T-Mobile SIM card in it instead of Cingular? –No.
But what if I keep asking? Then will it be available beyond Cingular? -No.
Is there a Verizon version? –NO!!!!

To understand angry, you have to first understand happy. And satisfied.

When the Center Is Fine, But the Policies are Broken

Now, we come to the hard stuff - how to deal with Super Empowered Angry Customers before (and during) the interactions that make them so powerful.

Thomas Friedman and the Flat World

The idea of the "super-empowered" person did not come from me. It's a favorite trope of best-selling author and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, though he uses it in a more political setting. Friedman has become famous for his exposition of the "flat world," his description of the level playing field between countries brought about by increasing globalization. It's not a coincidence that much of that globalization is crystallized for him in the way American call center jobs are being outsourced and offshored to places like India.

How Paul English Aggregated Customer Discontent

The second part in an ongoing series about what happens when customer dissatisfaction isn't managed properly.

What's A "Super Empowered Angry Customer"?

A couple of months ago, I wrote an article talking about an emerging phenomenon, the Super Empowered Angry Customer. The time has come to expand on that idea and flesh it out a little. My next few posts will try to do that.

Why are bad customer service stories so fascinating? I just spent a couple minutes enraptured by a tale of mediocre service at Chuck E. Cheese Pizza posted on the VocaLabs blog. It wasn't call center related, but still, it kept my attention. I wanted to know what would happen next. Would the customer get free video game tokens? Yes. What a relief.

Yet another example of the way customer service blunders can become amplified in today's supercharged media environment:

Peter Leppik of VocaLabs, the Minneapolis-based customer satisfaction survey firm, gave me a copy of his book Gourmet Customer Service: A Scientific Approach to Improving the Caller Experience at the Seattle ACCE show last week. I've been thumbing through it, and I've found some gems in the glossary:

The Daily News has a short piece on some of the weird calls that come into the NYC 311 center. The highlights:

Dell is starting to read -- and respond to -- blogs now. Spokesman Jess Blackburn told the UK Guardian, "We do try to stay alert to what's being posted out there about Dell -- although we only respond when we think there are completely inaccurate reports and misinformation." This after video of exploding laptop batteries circlulated the Internet.

According to the Guardian more companies are (slowly) discovering that if they don't listen to their customers up front, their customers will talk to each other -- and the world -- via blogs. Their answer? Start reading blogs.

Companies and their call centers are used to thinking about customers from an asymmetrical point of view. What I mean is that they tend to view customers as "powerful" only when they are aggregated into huge groups. Any individual unhappy customer is a case to be resolved, but an army of unhappy customers is a force to be reckoned with.

The Washington Post interviewed Ben Popken, editor of one of our favorite blogs -- The Consumerist. Popken gives tips on how to avoid -- or at least mitigate -- customer service nightmares. Tip one: keep a written log of your call center interactions.

Beware dear agents, super-informed, super-organized callers armed with recording devices are going to get more common.

Read the rest of Popkens's tips here.

A site run by the same publisher (the Gawker group), Lifehacker, has some tips from readers on getting good service here. One reader had this to say:

I suggest that where legal (apparently in 38 states - check your local laws) we ALL start taping our calls to customer service. If they think their call may end up on a blog post somewhere, perhaps they will treat the customer with a little respect. I also must point out that not all CS calls are a nightmare... in fact I had a rather pleasant call this morning with a woman from Virginia who worked for Verizon. I'm all for praising a company or person, when they get it right.

Get it while you still can -- Consumerist has AOL's complete customer retention manual available for download. Just click on the smoking gun image (I'm not kidding) to download a pdf.

Even if you're squeamish about downloading a company's employee training documents, read the Consumerist critique and coverage of the AOL client retention debacle.

It's bizarre. You can use it to explain to your call center exactly what you should not do, which is to "Think of Cancellation Calls as Sales Leads," as the AOL manual says. It's slimy and your customers aren't that stupid.

Here's a short summary of AOL's customer service slide into media hell:

1. August 2005: New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer gets AOL to pay a $1.25 million fine for its nasty policy of haggling with customers who try to cancel service, and for billing cancelers anyway.

2. June 2006: AOL customer Vincent Ferrari records the call he makes to AOL. Ferrari tries to cancel and the agent, known only as 'John,' argues with him for about four minutes that seem like hours. Ferrari posts the recording all over the Internet.

3. Vincent Ferrari becomes the new Paul English, appearing on talk shows and in newspapers all over the country.

4. AOL representative Nicholas Graham apologizes publicly to Ferrari, announcing that 'John' has been fired, saying that he "violated our customer service guidelines and practices, and everything that AOL believes to be important in customer care - chief among them being respect for the member, and swiftly honoring their requests." No one buys it. The blogosphere flames are fanned.

5. July 2006: the Consumerist blog obtains an AOL client retention manual from a disgruntled employee. They publish it online.

In a previous post, Customer Service Ninjas Slice Through Average CSRs -- Learn How, I quoted some advice from ICMI's Queue Tips page on dealing with callers who ask to speak to a manager. The original question, asked by Lynn Cherry of Skylight Financial was this:

How do you respond to a customer who insists on speaking to a supervisor or "someone in authority" for routine issues that an agent is capable of handling? Is it rude to refuse the transfer?

There were some pretty cynical answers from some very practical managers ("when customers insist on talking to a supervisor we just passed it to the next guy, introducing him as supervisor."). One respondent emphasized that "if the customer keeps on insisting he/she should be transferred immediately." That's true, and it's better than some of the other answers, but it still didn't quite satisfy me. The latest response, however, did satisfy me. Here it is in full:

From the Consumerist blog entry titled "How to be a Customer Service Ninja": a reader writes in to share a "hot tip" on how to "pole vault low-level CSR [sic] and reach the Valhalla of customer service" which you may know as "the phone call equivalent to the holy grail -- a call back by someone on the executive service team." Not to mix metaphors.

The online world is full of people who are getting wise to the ways of the call center industry. Irritated consumers are learning how to game everything from IVR systems to whole customer service workflows.

Here's one: on a blog called I Will Teach You To Be Rich (give yourself airs, why don't you) a guy has posted a sample excel spreadsheet that callers should use to keep track of the "lies and promises" call centers make to customers.

So, what do you learn from this? Don't tell the customer something if you can't follow through on it. Stuff we learned in kindergarten still applies: don't lie when you say you're gonna do something. Tell the truth to the caller.

No fewer than 15 people left comments on that blog adding more ideas and suggestions for keeping YOU honest.

And it all stemmed from a single horrific experience that the writer had with a call center at Sprint. Way to go, telco.