As a refugee from the call centre industry, Chris Brogan’s post arguing that businesses would be better off investigating other channels of customer service than obsessing about call centre performance really hit home with me.

As I say in the comments to Chris’s post, one of the important things for businesses to learn is that customers who contact you via a given channel (e-mail, for example) probably want to keep the conversation going using the same channel. I used to manage an e-mail enquiry service that was a sideline to a larger call centre, and one thing I asked my staff to do was to sign off every e-mail by inviting the customer to e-mail again with any follow-up, rather than just saying “if you have any questions, please call us”. If they wanted to make a phone call, they would have done so already.

This does have some technical and procedural implications–you need to make sure the e-mail address you’re sending from is not one of those “unrepliable” addresses (a huge peeve of mine), and you need to try to route follow-up e-mails to the person who answered the original enquiry wherever possible. But in my experience, if your turnaround time and the quality of your replies are good enough, those weird customers who prefer to communicate in writing really appreciate it.

I’m one of those customers, and by way of contrast, here’s a really bad experience I had earlier this year:

I’d noticed a charge on my mobile phone bill that was demonstrably wrong. (No, it wasn’t a call to one of those, er, “premium” services.) So I went to the telco’s website (I won’t say which one) and filled in an enquiry form, choosing “billing” as the category. I didn’t want to phone their call centre because (a) I don’t really like phoning call centres (I know, irony, etc.), and (b) I’d previously spent 15 minutes with them just changing some credit card details; God knows how long it would have taken to dispute a bill.

About five days later, I got an automatically generated response pointing me to some FAQs on the website that their keyword analysis program thought might answer my question. Don’t ask me how an auto-responder can take that long to answer an e-mail! Of course my issue wasn’t resolved, so I wrote back asking for it to be forwarded to a real person. Another week went by, and I eventually received a reply saying, and I quote, “Thank you for your email regarding billing charges, as this is a sensitive matter, can you please contact us on customer care 13xxxx”.

The moral of the story? Among others: if you don’t want to deal with billing issues by e-mail, don’t list billing as a category on your bloody enquiry form!