| I get unbelievably bad phone service from: * The phone company (for instance, my DSL goes down for 2 days because three tiers of tech support can't reset a DSLAM port without doing a truck roll first) * My bank (for instance, it takes 1.5 hours in a grocery store parking lot to clear a bogus fraud alert on my debit card) * My mortgage (for instance, it takes 3 30+ minute calls to successfully confirm receipt of a screwed up mortgage paymetn) * FedEx (for instance, FedEx can't explain the difference between Freight and Standard shipping, doesn't know that they can't schedule a Freight pickup, and delays a shipment for a day) * Airlines (for instance, it takes 30+ minutes to confirm that no support tier at Air Canada can fix screwed up seat assignments that take 4 minutes for a gate agent to fix afterwards) * Taxi dispatches (for instance, I book a car a couple hours in advance, call multiple times to confirm, and find out 15 minutes after my deadline that no order was ever taken) I'm being serious: I can't come up with an example where phone support involved a call center for me where I've had a good --- or even acceptable --- experience. Call centers are uniformly terrible. I'm convinced this is so because call centers have no incentive to be effective. They are pure cost centers, necessary evils for their owners. That's why so many of them get outsourced, further attenuating any accountability for their work. |
A medical call center like the one described in the article doesn't need to be a cost center. I could easily see them being run as standalone companies.