I work as a call-taker for a government agency and I’m fed up with the number of calls I get complaining about our website. All my colleagues feel the same way. Anyone who has worked in a support call centre like ours probably does too.
Normally my job is fine, but I – in fact, all of us in the call centre – keep getting stuck on calls with people who are angry that there aren’t email addresses listed on our website to contact about their problems.
Customers often don’t want to call us with their problems because, even though we do our best, there can be a long wait-time on hold and sometimes they get bounced around the call centre to find the right person for their problem. Sometimes they have to provide detailed information or attachments to describe their problem, which doesn’t work so well over the phone. I don’t blame customers for being frustrated, but it’s no fun for us and doesn’t help them when they’re already angry by the time we pick up their call.
When someone looks at our website, they’ll find just two email addresses available for the public. They’re both for very specific topics, neither of which seems to be a big priority for the people who call us. One is only for reporting fraudulent or ethical violations. The other is only for maintenance and cleaning issues in one, very specific, location among our thousands of locations.
Surely it just makes more sense to have a more general email address or two, or even a web chat option, to handle a wide range of customer issues. That way we can balance demand peaks without keeping the customer on hold, they can give us more of the information we need to help them in a single contact, and we won’t have to waste time absorbing complaints about why they have to call us before we even get onto their actual problem.
