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On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

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Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#131

Post by skybrian »

sandworm101 wrote: post #110
skybrian wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those questions don't seem consistent with just wanting to chat. Aren't a lot of people concerned about delivery times?

And those legitimate questions can be answered elsewhere. The elderly person wanting to chat is looking for an excuse so to do. They take one issue that justifies calling customer support and then once they have someone on the line throw in every other little detail. Younger people, who don't like talking to customer support, seek to limit their call to as narrow an issue as possible. Elderly callers enjoy expanding…

In my experience, there are elderly people who don't particularly like to read documentation (if they can even find it) or use the Internet. It would make sense that they expect to learn things by talking to people, and try to get all their questions answered while they have someone on the line.

(But I didn't listen to the phone calls, so what do I know?)

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#132

Post by housingpost »

crb002 wrote: post #48

That is an ADA lawsuit waiting to happen.

Not only that, but a racial discrimination lawsuit. If someone can prove that one of the protected classes is getting worse service, it might make for a nice class-action. I’d love to see Zeta Global (among others) lose a few million for perpetrating this nonsense.

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#133

Post by bdamm »

njarboe wrote: post #107
kenneth wrote: post #57

The most obvious example of this in daily life is through airlines, where the difference is pretty transparent and you get night-and-day better service by being a loyal customer. With top status with AA and UA (EXP and 1K), you connected to U.S.-based very senior phone agents right away, who always make sure to take care of any issue that arises. 50min delay on your AA flight? No problem, sir, we are rebooking you on…

So if you aren't in the top tier, fly Southwest as much as you can. I do. All the same seats with minor differentiation possible. There are many reasons they have been the only airline to be profitable for decades, but having good service for everyone is definitelty one of the reasons.

Also, Southwest's no-questions-asked-no-limits policy on cancelling and rebooking tickets makes them my favorite. They recently put a limit of one year on the rebooked ticket, however. You can do this right up until boarding has already begun and there are no penalties. Nobody else does this.

They're polite, they're generally well run, seats are reasonable, maintenance seems to be good, they have good routes, cheap tickets, good baggage policy, and don't fee you to death. On top of that, they have responsive customer service on the phone, or via DM Twitter, which is way better than sitting on the phone!

Whatever they're doing is the right way and all other airlines should just copy them.

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#134

Post by technofiend »

arebop wrote: post #108
wpietri wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangent: Are there other people here who just refuse to sign up for any of these programs? I have family members who are super into frequent flyer programs, credit card points, etc, etc. But I don't like the cognitive load they introduce, and I don't like having to figure out how much I'm being manipulated in any given interaction. I get that I'm missing out on goodies, but they're paying for those goodies somehow, s…

Also: does anyone see these programs and think wow, this airline UX is so awful I want to show them my loyalty so that eventually they'll stop trying so hard to make me unhappy? I'm pretty convinced this all boils down to a sort of low-grade white collar corruption: people who travel a lot for business sometimes can get away with favoring one airline over another, where this decision costs the shareholders a little b…

>I'm pretty convinced this all boils down to a sort of low-grade white collar corruption: people who travel a lot for business sometimes can get away with favoring one airline over another,

I suppose it depends on the business but at my Fortune 50 we're required to use "lowest logical airfare". You can force a choice of Southwest over United by choosing one airport over another, and there's enough wiggle room to let you fly at your preferred times but overall it's designed to prevent gaming and escalates things for review if you try.

But unless you're a highly placed executive no one travels on the company dime often enough to bother with air miles anyway; airlines require far too much travel for even the bottom-most loyalty tier.

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#136

Post by ggm »

inetknght wrote: post #128
ggm wrote: post #113

Serious question: google has no helpdesk at the consumer level and a very fractured one in corporate space. (I have GPC. AdWords and some other relationships for work aside from my personal google id so I do believe I know something of what I write, because I've seen at least two or three of the many sides of their product space beyond consumer ones) Does anyone believe they could run some kind of helpdesk at consume…

Yes absolutely. Why do you think there's so many tech support fraud? Why do you think Geek Squad is a thing?

So.. if there's a profitable business here, why isn't google running helpdesk over its consumer products? They monetise as good as the next hegemon, why not this?

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#137

Post by CrackpotGonzo »

kenneth wrote: post #57

The most obvious example of this in daily life is through airlines, where the difference is pretty transparent and you get night-and-day better service by being a loyal customer. With top status with AA and UA (EXP and 1K), you connected to U.S.-based very senior phone agents right away, who always make sure to take care of any issue that arises. 50min delay on your AA flight? No problem, sir, we are rebooking you on…

I was lucky enough to fly Global Services on United through my old boss' account at my old company.

Flew internationally a couple of times and the level of attention was insane.

Get to airport and they walk you to the lounge, past security, and then come grab you when you're ready to pre-board (before everyone including military).

My connecting flight was delayed by 20 minutes, cutting down my connection time to 50 minutes. No problem, concierge called me and let me know they had proactively booked me on the next available flight just in case.

I would always buy economy seats and there wasn't a single time I wasn't upgraded to first.

Whole experience was insane, wish I could qualify for GS ever in my life.

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#138

Post by kenneth »

wpietri wrote: post #96
kenneth wrote: post #57

The most obvious example of this in daily life is through airlines, where the difference is pretty transparent and you get night-and-day better service by being a loyal customer. With top status with AA and UA (EXP and 1K), you connected to U.S.-based very senior phone agents right away, who always make sure to take care of any issue that arises. 50min delay on your AA flight? No problem, sir, we are rebooking you on…

Tangent: Are there other people here who just refuse to sign up for any of these programs? I have family members who are super into frequent flyer programs, credit card points, etc, etc. But I don't like the cognitive load they introduce, and I don't like having to figure out how much I'm being manipulated in any given interaction. I get that I'm missing out on goodies, but they're paying for those goodies somehow, s…

You're giving up a 5%+ (minimum) return on your money spent by declining to participate. For me the return is closer to 20–30%. Declining to participate has a non-trivial opportunity cost.

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#139

Post by johnchristopher »

newnewpdro wrote: post #95
mehrdadn wrote: post #91

> Zeta Global, whose clients include wireless carriers, generates scores using data points such as the number of times a customer has dialed a call center and whether that person has browsed a competitor’s website or searched certain keywords in the past few days. Wait, so this means I dial a number and they link my identity to my browser to tell whether I've browsed a competitor's website in the past few days? Is th…

Did you think they weren't going to leverage your phone number in other ways when you furnished it for "improved security"?

I distinctly remember reading "and we'll never use this number for other purposes than security".

Everybody (including HN) was pushing for 2FA. People followed.

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#140

Post by da_chicken »

jklinger410 wrote: post #130
mehrdadn wrote: post #91

> Zeta Global, whose clients include wireless carriers, generates scores using data points such as the number of times a customer has dialed a call center and whether that person has browsed a competitor’s website or searched certain keywords in the past few days. Wait, so this means I dial a number and they link my identity to my browser to tell whether I've browsed a competitor's website in the past few days? Is th…

>they link my identity to my browser They link your phone number to a session/user along with ad networks who have stored cookies on your machine and use predictive modeling to guess at who you are/what you do. It doesn't work on 90% of the HN crowd, people who block ads/disable javascript, or just don't do a lot of traditional "browsing", but yeah.

You know, I'm quickly reaching a point where I want the default browser to work in Incognito mode, and the browser should only switch to regular mode when I explicitly whitelist the domain.
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