Customer service phone call - an opportunity to 'humanize' your business

Companies are becoming more and more inhuman when it comes to customer service support phone calls. They make the customer feel stupid by making them talk to their voice recognition software, and making their dear customer answer questions repeatedly until a robot correctly understands what is being said. Imagine the embarrassment when calling customer service while you are in a public place where there is a possibility of others overhearing you say 'internet connection down.....internet connection down' endless number of times in different accents just so that the voice recognition software understands what you are saying. Why do businesses today want to embarrass their customers. All this does is just create ill-feeling towards the company. Reducing the cost of customer support by using voice recognition software to automate tasks is a good idea, but is it really worth it when what it exactly does is create ill-feeling towards your business.

Instead, customer support call is a great opportunity to 'humanize' your business. Its a great opportunity to present a human side of your business. In case you have screwed up and your customers are calling you for that, its a great opportunity to let them talk to a live person who would be able to convey more humanly (and emotionally too) that you are aware of the issue and are trying your best to fix it. Customers wouldn't mind screw ups so much if they are assured that they are being worked on and will be fixed soon. Humanizing your business will create empathy towards your business in the hearts of your customer. It will only create more loyal customers. Imagine how ecstatic your customers would feel because they got a chance to talk to a live person straight away, when they were anticipating pressing numbers for different menu options or clearing their throat for preparing to speak to a voice recognition software.

When it comes to putting your customer service on steroids, following comes to my mind:
1. Have a front line of customer service representatives (and lots of them) just for triaging the call. This would give the impression to the customer that they had a chance to talk to a a live person right away. After this initial welcome and triaging of the call by a real human, it would make it less painful to wait on hold. Also since the call would be triaged by a human, it would be more routed correctly to related second-level of representative.

2. To make #1 even better, instead of putting customer on hold after triaging the call (by a real human), get a callback number from the customer and tell them you will call back in certain amount of time. This would free up the customer who would gladly accept the incoming call later from your customer service department.

Do the above options really cost companies too much when weighed in the loyal customers it would bring in. Would it really cost companies too much when weighed in the fact that happy customers will evangelize their business bringing in even more new customers. Is squeezing cost on customer service really a good idea? Instead, humanize your business and provide more humans on other side of the phone when your customers call in. All your customers want is to talk to a human instead of pressing number for endless menu options and repeatedly saying something which your voice recognition prompts them to say.

Amazon.com: Wish it had 'Wish Price' for items in 'Wish List'

For every product, there is a customer at a given price. 80GB iPod may retail at $333. Definitely, there will be customers living on cutting edge and are willing to pay that price. However, there will be many more potential buyers for the same iPod at say $250, and even more buyers at $200. Increase in sales volume can help bring down the price. Also, with consumer electronics product, price also decreases with time, at which point buyers who have waited to buy at lower prices will jump in. Currently, a large subset of consumers are willing to wait out for prices to fall over a period of time at which point it becomes affordable for them.

Instead of price being a function of time, price can still be shrinked by increasing volume. Increasing volume means aggregating more buyers to buy a particular product. Which better place to aggregate buyers than Amazon.com. Similar to 'Wish List', Amazon can introduce 'Wish Price' where users can specify their willingness to buy a particular product at a given price. 'Wish price' is the price users 'wish' the price was at which they are willing to buy the product.

Amazon can perfectly orchestrate such buyer aggregation (demand aggregation). It already has wish list of millions of Amazon users. All they have to do is add another 'Wish Price' dimension for items listed in customer's 'Wish List'. Once, Amazon is aware of this Wish Price, it can very well orchestrate the demand to subsidize the price. This way, Amazon would have shrunk the time by aggregating more demand, leading to lower prices.