Marketing philosopher  Seth Godin takes on an issue that I find particularly irksome, the inbound call to customer service.  As badass astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, recently twitted, “after 15 minutes, I’m beginning to think my call is not very important to you.” Me too.

Rules for treating inbound customer calls with respect:

0. Spend a lot more money on this. Hire more agents. Train them better. Treat them with respect and they’ll do the same to those they interact with. Have a bright red light flash on the CEO’s desk whenever anyone, anywhere, is on hold for more than 5 minutes. If it gets to seven, have the call automatically route to the mobile phone of the CEO’s spouse.

1. Have a very smart and very motivated front line. “I’ll connect you directly to the person who can help you if you let me know what you need…” Don’t have these people pretend that they can help. It leads to long conversations and frustration.

2. 80% of your inbound calls are about the same ten things. First, eliminate those problems in future products, packaging and policies. The best way to handle these calls is to eliminate them. Second, put clear, fun and complete answers to these questions online where they are easy to find. And third, hire talented voice actors to record engaging answers to each, and offer them as a first resort as a result of #1, above.

3. Change your onhold music to Bill Cosby and Woody Allen records.

4. Whenever the wait is more than two minutes, offer a simple way to be called back, and then make sure it works.

5. If you’re closed, tell us the hours you are open and the relevant websites. Make sure the information is accurate.

To the extent that this is offered from the perspective of the company taking the inbound calls, it’s understandable.  They don’t exactly meet my criteria for a good experience, mostly because they still involve a massive waste of my time, whether on hold, hearing l-e-n-g-t-h-y explanations of how to plug the damn thing in the socket, under the assumption that the caller is dumber than a brick (which may well be true).

Godin goes on to make a critical point, which is what really caught my attention:

(NB it’s just fine to make it clear that a call is not important to you. I’ve never built a company around amazing phone support, precisely because it’s so difficult to keep the promise. As far as I’m concerned, it’s fine for some industries to not do the phone well. Just be clear that this is the case by routing people off the phone or at least not lying about it).

Whoa. Now that’s a mind-blowing idea. Conventional marketing wisdom is that every business must have a customer service existence in order to maintain the pretense that they care about the customer after the sale.  They employ the standard tactics, “your phone call is very important to us,” and “we’re sorry for the inconvenience” of your mother dying because their iron lung failed.

What if you called a company and this was the message, as recorded by Morgan Freeman:

Thank you for calling Megacorp, selling products you adore because they have all the really cool shiny bells and whistles that Americans so desperately want, made by orphans in the Fujian province of China.

If you really want to speak with a person, your hold time will be at least 57 minutes, as we outsource customer service calls to a 12 person call center in small town outside Bangalore, all of whom call themselves “Sue,” and we can get thousands of calls an hour because about 20% of our products fail miserably. The other 80% last until the warranty period expires, not that it really matters since it’s just legal gobbledygook intended to make you think we stand behind our products. Frankly, we’re just as surprised they last that long as you are.

If you choose to wait on hold for at least 57 minutes, you will speak with a young woman (her name will be “Sue”) who knows nothing more about our products then you do. You will be asked a series of questions about why you’re calling to give you the impression that the person you speak with has some sort of specialized knowledge, but you will actually get picked up by the next available person regardless of why you’re calling. Sue will repeat every word you say, getting it wrong the first time, in order to give you the impression that we’re paying close attention to detail. This will take at least 17 additional minutes of your life, which you will never get back.

Sue has never actually seen any of our products. Sue doesn’t even own a pair of shoes, because she can’t afford them on what we pay for her services. She will put you on hold and take a look at the manual, the very same one we sent you with our product. She won’t know any more about it than you would if you had read the manual. We know you can’t be bothered, which makes Sue seem as if she knows more than she does.

Because Sue has never actually seen any of our products, and doesn’t even own a pair of shoes, she really won’t care about your concern that you’re going to miss your mani/pedi appointment if she doesn’t get a move on, or can’t call your broker because you only get four bars on your gizmo. Her family eats one meal a week, and your first-world-whining just doesn’t rock her world. But she will pretend she understands.  

We understand, because we’re more like you, but then, nobody who actually works for Megacorp would spend their time talking to you. You see, you’ve already bought our product and we have your money. We have better things to do with our time. Like getting our own mani-pedi’s.

If you decide that it’s worth your while to spend at least 57 minutes on the phone waiting to speak with Sue, she will read from the script we’ve prepared that instructs her to tell you that she is sorry for your inconvenience, even though she had nothing to do with your problem and it’s unlikely that the word “inconvenience” really suits the situation. It’s just that nobody has come up with a more benign word that the lawyers will let us say. It’s never our product. It’s just that we feel your pain. See how that works?

Sue will then tell you that she can definitely help you, because focus groups tell us that it’s what you want to hear, even though there is nothing she can do to fix anything. But then, if you’ve sat on hold for that long, chances are pretty good that you will fall for a line like this and feel that, even though your problem wasn’t fixed, we care deeply about you. That’s enough for anyone willing to waste that much of their life, since you obviously don’t want to think too hard.

At the end of the call, Sue will ask if there is anything else she can do for you, even though she hasn’t done anything for you yet.  You will say “no,” allowing us to put out a press release about the marvels of our customer service satisfying 100% of our inbound callers. With that sort of claim, you will feel confident buying a new gizmo from us to replace the one that you called about which doesn’t work.

At Megacorp, your call is not important to us. In fact, we find it laughable that anyone would even bother spending a minute of their life on hold because of us. But if you still feel the need to speak to Sue, please hold.  While waiting, we hope you enjoy  a loop of the Best of Bill Cosby. Hey, hey, hey.