Who is being served? Dreamed 6051 days ago | | 417 words

Today, during the role playing we were doing in our call center training, we took turns troubleshooting different issues the trainer through at us. I hate role playing. I have been taking calls with the help of my mentor for two days now. I don’t need to be babied through the process. But I do understand it helps others who have not worked in a help desk environment before.

Normally, when people call in to the center, they have entered their user ID into the phone system which gets sent to the technician and their name/address/phone number/etc is pulled up on the technician’s screen. So when you call me, if you’ve entered your ID correctly, I know who you are, where you are and the system opens a ticket so I am ready to help you.

In the course of taking calls the past two days, I have hit on a couple people who either skipped that prompt, or did not enter their number correctly. As a result, I get no record of a “fake person” record appear so the ticket is still able to open.

To me, logic would dictate you’d ask their name to be polite, then ask for their ID so you can pull up their record to verify their information and assist them.

I was told this is incorrect.

We must ask the user’s name, search for them, and try to pull the record up that way. The idea being people are not numbers and we emphasize that.

OK.

I have no problem with making people feel special and individual and important. Great!

However, instead of having an ID I can look up and get the correct record (one person to one ID), I have to ask their name and search.

Possible failure points here include:

Possible point of failure for look up via ID?

By the time the user has gotten to me, they’ve been waiting. Be it a long or short wait, there’s no difference to the frustrated user. They had to wait, and in this industry, they’re losing money. In addition, I want to make the transition from phone to human as smooth as possible and get them up and running quickly and correctly.

Now, I don’t possess any degrees of certifications in IT, customer service, or finance but it would seem to me the quickest and most accurate way to assist the user would be best.

Once again, the corporation wins over the user’s best interests.

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