I had reason to call the Disney resort reservation line yesterday to extend my stay next week at the IQPC Call Center Summit. If it wasn't so sad then the following would have been quite comical...
I called to add one day to my stay to accommodate additional meetings that I had scheduled. The call took more than 3 minutes before it was answered and then the security questions took 3 more minutes. The volume at the start of the call was about a million decibels and by the end I couldn't hear the agent. After more than 8 minutes of talking at cross purposes, the agent confessed he could help me and that I need to call another number. No he "wasn't allowed to transfer the call", but he did wish me a nice day and asked if he had resolved my reason for calling. I started to explain that, no he and I had concluded that he couldn't help me, but I came to my senses before that happened. I was the n connected to a post call survey which was heavy on touchy-feely agent engagement questions, but ignored topics like resolution, timeliness of response and the quality of the connection.
The entire experience was poor, long wait time, no resolution, no early qualification to determine if they could help and ridiculously long security process (none of which was repeated when I spoke to the correct person). The agent wasn't eager, helpful or touchy-feely.
Now I know better than many the challenges of working in and/or operating a contact center and the dangers of judging a center based upon a single snapshot or interaction, but let me tell you my opinion of Disney declined immensely due to this interaction. The fact that I was calling regarding a call center event does add an element of perverse humor.
2 comments:
Well they say that the key to customer retention is often how well you recover from a service failure. If this is the case then Disney did a good job. 4 hours after posting this on my blog I got a call from Disney who said that someone forwarded them the blog post (the power of the Internet) and that he wanted to apologise.
The explanation was a little weak (no reason to publish the wrong phone number on the reservation confirmation) and too little interest in the audio problem for my liking.
But I did get an apology and a complimentary upgrade. Now if a similar effort now is placed on correcting the above errors and processes then I will truly be a happy person.
Colin
Colin,
One key statement from your post that struck me is when you said that you know better than to judge the entire call center or company on the basis of one experience.
However, I would suggest that you are uncommonly logical and fair. In this day of competition, our customers aren't going to be as forgiving and may very well paint our entire company with the broad brush of one experience with one employee.
The question becomes, how to we ensure our employees treat each customer as the valuable GIFT they are?
I wonder if the employees you spoke with were more focused on a cheery voice and the touchy feeling questions because that is what they are measured against rather than the resolution you so rightly desired.
Deborah
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