Of Call Centers and IVRS

I wanted to speak with someone to handle one my service queries but the IVRS kept coming the way. I was exasperated by the time I made my way through the IVRS maze to finally make human contact. As a customer this became the bigger of the issues for which I had called the Vodaphone helpline. In this world of scaling up operations and volume growth where technology is a big time enabler, the big challenge that lies ahead for most marketers of services, is to how to use technology with losing out on the human touch. After all it is so impolite to curb the Independence of the customer by subjecting him to extremely limited interaction by way of which the customer can at best get the information which the marketer has posted in all good meaning but cannot get the answers to the questions that are bothering him the most. Finally after struggling through the maze of the IVRS system the poor customer lands up in the lap of a call center executive who speaks so sweetly, that one is bound to get afflicted by the killer diabetes, but fails to provide the desired answer or decision whatever the case may be. Escalation passage is provided but often leads to another maze. Finally one must bear in mind that these technologies are built on the premise that the customer has all the time in the world and only the marketer is the one who has a dearth of the resource. After all this is what has prompted the marketer to use inanimate technology, bereft of any sobering human touch, that eats into the time of the poor exasperated customer. It is ironical that while the service provider should have been the one with endless patience and time for "king" customer, what technology has landed up doing is the exact opposite. First the customer is subject to a barrage of instructions that is so hard to hear and somewhere amongst the several instructions, one may find the button to make human contact if one is lucky. And if you miss the message be prepared for a repeat attack. And the loop truly continues. No wonder one of the phone companies has adopted this as their brand name. The loop eventually gets under the skin of the customer driving him to the edge of sanity. And when he finally lands up at the door of a human with something called "emotion" and who is equipped with sensory organs to respond, realization soon dawns upon him that this is just the beginning of another maze.