Loose Cannon: Keep Your Eyes on the Fries

There’s an irrefutable law of nature: if a restaurant patron has an empty coffee cup and a plate half-filled with French fries, a waiter will grab the plate and ignore the cup.

I always read that as a sign that a restaurant doesn’t want any more of my business. Ditto for whatever force causes a waiter to throw down the check before asking if I’d like dessert.

Readers nodding in agreement likely have never managed an inbound call center. Like the French fry-stealing waiter, I’ve gotten the feeling from some phone reps that they’re racing to end the call.

Sure, this might be a personal slight. But I think it’s more bad customer relations being done in the name of efficiency. The length of an inbound call is an easily measurable metric, and one that call center managers often tally. But that doesn’t make it the right one.

There are other tangible measures, such as the value of additional products sold. This may be a little hard to link back to a specific phone call, but it will look better on the marketer’s bottom line.

There are intangible measures as well, like customer goodwill. Alas, when pitted against the short-sighted metrics call centers use, the longer-term benefits of CRM are going to come up lacking.

But if this is the way call center managers want to quantify their results, so be it. What galls me is that some of the same companies that measure the length of phone calls conduct customer satisfaction survey services.

What, exactly, do they hope to find?

Here’s a tip for these so-called service centers: When it comes to customer calls, we want that last French fry.

To respond to the opinions in this column, please contact rlevey@primediabusiness.com.