This piece is prompted by a call I made to a home repair company recently. I'm pretty sure that the company consists of the owner, his wife who handles the phones, and maybe 3-4 stringers of varying capabilities in the English language, who help with the actual work.
I called at night, intending to leave a message for them to call me in the morning to schedule an estimate. Sure enough, the call went to automated reply, where I could choose 1 for this, 2 for that, etc. But astonishingly enough, the first thing out of the electronic mouth of the recording was this.
"Thank you for calling [XXX] Home Repair. Please listen carefully, as our menu options have changed." Underlines are my own.
Now, I have to ask this. I can imagine that if you call General Motors or Verizon or Bank of America, their businesses are complicated enough that once in a while their customer service lines might have to change their menu options. I'm sure you feel the same way.
But come on, maybe what -- 80% of customer-service lines with push-button choice selections lead off with "Please listen carefully as our menu options have changed."
No, they haven't. You don't have enough freaking options to have ever changed them!
Do we have to be so contemptuous of our customers? Because once you've heard the "menu options have changed" line for the eleventh time, you understand that it's a fat lie. What bothers me is that the truth is perfectly fine and equally inoffensive. All the business wants is to route the call properly to serve the customer the best way possible, and that means asking him to listen to all the options and not just go with the first one that sounds good.
Would it be too hard to respect my intelligence? Just have your recording say "Thank you for calling Company X. Please listen carefully to the menu options, so that we can connect you with the person who can best assist you."
I believe that would take about the same amount of time, and I would feel my time is respected. Lying to me about your menu options changing is not respecting me. Rambling on about things I don't need to know before giving me those menu options is not respecting me (i.e., if you're going to give me a 45-second sales pitch, at least say up front that you can get to the menu options at any time by hitting the pound sign).
It shouldn't bother me, and it's not like it really does all that much, but I don't like my intelligence to be insulted, even with a little white lie for convenience. I've owned a business, and even in the retail one our message choices were simply "Welcome to [our company]. for sales, please press 1. For customer service ..." We thought like a customer would, and made it simple.
Simple -- and truthful. It is not that hard. Have a nice day.
Copyright 2017, 2016 by Robert Sutton
