Discussion on:

How to avoid the customer service 'fiasco formula'

With no bogus "confidentiality agreement" to worry about, I once worked for Pacific Gas and Electric doing customer service.

Our calls were monitored of course, but the BIG concern was always call times. I was told more than once by other employees that it was better for my job if I left the customer unsatisfied, so that they had to call back again to deal with their issue.

The TOTAL call times would of course be much greater, both for the company and for the individual customer with a complaint, and the customers would therefore be far less satisfied with our service. But, critically, the call times of we individual call takers would be shorter.

In other words, the company set out to count our minutes, thinking that it would mean fewer minutes spent dealing with each customer complaint. But we knew we would be fired if we stayed on the line that long -- EVEN THOUGH it would result in greater customer satisfaction AND shorter call times overall.

Operator input was never asked for, nor valued; hence people like me who tried to REALLY help our customers out got fired for doing so.

I have never worked a corporate job since.

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