[krirken]

This is correct. I once had a series of customer service reps deny me access to my account to the point where they told me my account was irretrievable. Irretrievable? I called back the next day and the new rep told me those other people were totally incorrect, and he resolved my issue in 15 minutes.

With high turnover rate and minimal training, most service reps are reading from a script and attempting to appease you into hanging up the phone anyway.

[bisby]

Some places get "rated" by the length of the calls, not number of happy customers, or resolution to call ratio... just length of calls. Keeping it short, even if it pisses off the customer is better for keeping their job.

[alexandercrohde]

I think a lot of people would discount this anecdote as absurd to be true, but I have found this too. I have a friend who did tech support for google and she was quantified on all sorts of naive tracking metrics that were company-focused instead of customer-focused (# of upsells, customers handled per day).

[rspeer]

Google has tech support?!

[lcpriest]

If you are a paying customer :)

[danek]

$[support costs] = [num customers] * [avg call duration]

So obviously you can save money by shortening call durations. This has a nice side effect of reducing the number of customers (over time), which also helps reduce support costs.

#metricsDrivenManagement

[seanp2k2]

A better metric might be cost per call. Outsourcing gives them cheaper per-call for the same length. Refusing service probably also shortens the call length. Refusing to do anything outside of the scripted interactions probably leads to some type of punishment for the rep.

[kahrkunne]

Then why do they make me assure them that yes, it's really plugged in 10 times in a call?

[bisby]

could be a variety of factors. might be a small department, which means if you call back, thats another extended call for them, which is bad for the metric. better to get it solved the first time.

Or it could be simply a place that doesn't use the call length metric, I imagine every call center has its own set of rules. I can only speak for the ones that my friends work[ed] for. Overseas call centers may have less focus on call length since the cost of the call to the company is less.