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Working in the industry, lots of companies rely on outsourced work through Business Process Outsourcers. Basically you are calling Target or another company and
by nonstopdev 4y ago
Working in the industry, lots of companies rely on outsourced work through Business Process Outsourcers. Basically you are calling Target or another company and in their internal system probably run by Avaya or Cisco on ancient hardware and only can process limited inputs like DTMF/Touch and a tree format. When you transfer to a person, that agent works in a different region/office/company and on a different system. Since they transfer through a phone number, no data passes so they have no idea who you are and chances are have a different system that sees a limited set of information to handle your call.
Telephony is a cost center for most companies and the work to build clean experiences for callers is not a priority so a lot of companies have these broken systems and spending money maintenance to keep them running instead of understanding how a proper experience for someone helps their business and brand.
- nico 4y ago> Telephony is a cost center for most companies This is the key here. > Since they transfer through a phone number, no data passes so they have no idea who you are This really depends on the capabilities of the system and the willingness of the company to improve their CX. For example, short info like customer name, ticket/account/order number, can easily be passed via text-to-speech, through the phone, to the agent on the line, before connecting the customer.
- scarface74 4y agoBecause a call center is a cost center, is even more of a reason to make it as efficient as possible. I’m not a call center/contact flow designer expert by any means. But I do work on cloud based call center design and integrations occasionally.
- dqv 4y agoYeah it’s weird because you could definitely do some kind of data transfer with SIP headers.
- scarface74 4y agoYeah that’s kind of out of my domain. I was trying to avoid hawking my employer’s product. I’ve created call center solutions with Amazon Connect. With that, you can do basically any type of integration via a Lambda. You can integrate with Salesforce and have a ticket with all of the information automatically pop up on screen by the time the call is transferred to a human.
- closeparen 4y agoBut why do they collect your information through the IVR in the first place, if they can't pass it to the agent?
- Pyrodogg 4y agoI suppose it also let's the entity running the IVR to monitor and log things themselves. Now they know what you called about, and to which third party they directed your call to. If the first party runs the post call questionnaire, they might get full loop feedback on how their contractor is handling calls; from the end user an not the contractor.
- Doddler 4y agoWhen I did Comcast phone support it was common to have different call centers and queues for different regions, each region has different internal tools owing to differing networks during acquisitions so only agents with the right tools and accounts would be able to handle certain customers. Our center handled multiple regions but agents would usually be trained to handle just one. Usually the IVR will make cursory account billing and outage checks and then forward the call to the appropriate location.
- brokenodo 4y agoI also had the displeasure of working for Comcast in phone support before I went back to school and this is definitely part of the reason. Multiple completely different decrepit and kafkaesque billing systems because they were too lazy or incompetent to properly migrate customers over to a unified modern one. IMO, one of the reasons Comcast has had notoriously bad customer support is because their internal systems were so complicated that even reps who wanted to help might have just given up and told you they fixed the issue to get you off the phone.
- nreilly 4y agoYou may also find agents don't trust the supplied information, even if they have access to it.
- pengaru 4y ago