can you hear me now?
Alas, the telecommunications industry keeps opening their wallets to consultants who are desperately trying to solve one of the world’s biggest mysteries… how to run a call centre well.
I’ve just recently had my contract with Fido expire. This puts the power of negotiation in my corner. I have a whole whack of customer lifetime value to offer. In addition, I run most of my business activities through my cell phone. Here is a mashup of the sequences of events I experienced with my friendly neighbourhood (wink) call centre representatives…
3 days before my contract expires Fido, Rogers, and StudentPhones.com (all women - which I mention only because it makes the story easier to paraphrase) call to say,
“Sir, your contract is almost up and you should act quickly to take advantage of our offer.”
My response,
“Does my cell phone explode if I’m not on a contract?”
We know the answer. So I politely ask if they are able to recommend me a plan that fits the pattern of my activities over the last 2 years. I figure they’ve got oodles of data and a gameplan for telling me that I need X minutes on weekends/weekdays, and X MB of data. I explain to them that I don’t need a phone and would like to apply the discount they offer on hardware to my plan. I think I nearly made her head explode right there on the spot. She explains,
“Well, I can offer you the following 1, 2, and 3 year plans and with regards to your new phone, you can choose from the following models.”
AMAZING! I’ve never seen a request dodged so blantanly in my life! Already familiar with where this conversation will take me, I reluctantly agree to go over the standard packages she has decided to push my way. Assuming this means I’m now in buy-mode, her eyes light up,
“Great, which package would you like me to tell you about first?”
I reply,
“Would you mind e-mailing these details so I can go over them at my leisure?”
Confused, she continues,
“We don’t do that sir, but I can tell you about them right now.”
At this point I’m impressed. This highly trained (sales? retention?) specialist has assumed that she has 45 minutes in the middle of a business day to tell me about all these standard issue plans. After such time, the expectation is that I will agree to a 2 or 3 year contract, the equivalent of a $2,500 purchase, on a whim. What can I say? I’ve given up. I’m past the point of recommending process improvements that she can claim as her own. I’m past caring. I’m on the month-to-month until someone figures out that I am an individual and the phone is a tool, not the other way around.
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Someone who talks a lot, listens a lot, sings on the streets and loves big ideas. If you need a discipline or two for piece of mind, try Marketer and Entrepreneur. If you need a title to legitimize why you'd waste your time here, I can't help you. I work with people on fire for the things they love.
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[…] I inquired with my good friends at TELUS as to why I couldn’t get a helpful hand as discussed in myprevious post. […]