RW Collision and Rogue Agents

During the Q&A after my talk to the Customer Care 2002 conference, I was asked how the expectations being set by the Web show up concretely in customer call centers. Good question. Being fact-averse and reality-challenged, I claim no expertise, but it seems to me that there are two obvious effects.

First, there’s the nebulous effect of expecting to be treated like a live human being by another live human being. Hewing to the script is more annoying than ever after having been on the Web with employees who talk for and as themselves.

Second, when I call for customer support, I no longer assume that the person on the other end of the line is my only source of information. If I can’t find out from the cable company, for instance, how to hook up my home network through a Linksys router (“We don’t support home networks”), and if I can’t find out from Linksys (“We don’t know the details of your ISP”), I know for a fact that I can find someone on the Net who either already has a site up devoted to networking Linksys and my ISP, or I can find someone to ask. And the information I get from another user is more likely to be helpful — truthful, no BS — than what I get from the call center. I am no longer a supplicant when I call for help.

In fact, when talking with Sarah Kennedy, one of the conference conveners, we came up with an idea. If a customer support agent is uncomfortable giving me an off-script answer, send me to a “rogue agent” (Sarah’s phrase), someone explicitly positioned as a source of creative ideas and information that may not work but that may get me out of my predicament. A rogue agent would be permitted to say things like, “Yeah, I heard about that problem once before, and I saw on a Web site that if you uncheck PPPoE it should work, which makes sense to me. On the other hand, there’s a small chance it might fry your Linksys box, so don’t come crying to me, ok?” Obviously, rogue agents should be patrolling the Internet, to learn and to teach. Sounds like a cool job to me.

Categories: Uncategorized dw