Comments on: Your Customers Don’t Want to Talk to You

By: Isegoria

Isegoria — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 19:41:13 +0000

I suspect that mindless verbal Taylorism reduces the quality of service from good service reps and increases the quality from bad reps — and most firms would prefer to pay less for help and go with a script to reduce downside risk. Still, the overly lengthy and overly elaborate greetings strike me as bad Taylorism, and I know I can't be the only customer who doesn't want to feel pressured by a "helpful" sales rep making me all kinds of offers. Then again, sometimes I decide that I do want fries with that.

By: David Foster

David Foster — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 16:25:05 +0000

My post, Mindless Verbal Taylorism, explores some of these points.

By: Foxmarks

Foxmarks — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 22:26:21 +0000

Some time back, maybe a year or two, my Wells Fargo branch seems to have adopted a policy of aggressive friendliness. They have a greeter to annoy you when you walk in. The tellers insist on introducing themselves and asking too many inane chit-chat questions that sometimes become intrusive. All this is a prelude to some kind of suggestive sell during the transaction.

Why do I have to say “no” to some lame offer every time I go to the bank? Can’t they at least track my responses and know that I don’t want their latest Passbook 9000 savings account?

I like to have a familiarity with the tellers should I ever have a difficult transaction. A machine can’t solve an unexpected problem. But can’t we just be polite and focus on getting the business done as quickly as possible? My time is worth money.

By: David Foster

David Foster — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 17:14:30 +0000

Part of this is due to the extremely scripted and rigid speech pattern that customer service agents are usually required to use. If you’re going to talk to a pseudo-robot anyway, why not go all the way and talk to a real robot?

I’ve always thought the “delight your customers” phrase was rather silly, unless you’re running a circus.