This reminds of of a story. I once worked at a place that would transfer solicitors and similar callers to our fake employee Helen Wait's voicemail (pronounced hell 'n wait). "Can I speak to somebody about where you buy your paper products?" "Sure, let me transfer you to Helen Wait."
Alla Klein: a fake person in charge of customer support
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Re: Alla Klein: a fake person in charge of customer support
#12Ah, a page out of the Citibank playbook. (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870354560457540...)
Re: Alla Klein: a fake person in charge of customer support
#13It looks like the lesson to take from this is not to create a fake persona for customer service, but to provide exemplary support. Other than the customers looking for a date, I doubt that satisfaction would be lower if "Alla" was actually "Daniel".
There is the case where your name is not common or not recognized easily by your target audience. I have a french name (Julien), try and pronounce that so an american knows what you are talking about (we target construction workers). Maybe the response wouldn't be "who are you again?" if my name was John or Eddy.
I'm Guillaume. I regularly tell people to just call me "William" :)
Re: Alla Klein: a fake person in charge of customer support
#14Is Alla Klein a veiled reference to their search engine, Alkaline? Is this just a more elaborate version of "Let me Google that for you" ?
Re: Alla Klein: a fake person in charge of customer support
#15I have to agree with martey here: the way you did support is fantastic, creating a fake persona is not. People like honesty and hate being fooled. If your customers found out about Alla, I think they would be very upset. Especially the ones who asked her out!
Using a pseudonym for customer support is a fairly accepted practice. Unfortunately, when it's your job to deal with a lot of customers you're inevitably going to have some that are unhappy with your response, no matter how well you do your job or how great your company is. If you deal with enough customers (thousands) over time, some of those unhappy customers are going to try to track you down outside of work and make your life difficult.
Customer want honesty from a company / service and good customer support. They want to be able to reach the contact they talked with before again, at the same name / extension. I don't think they generally care very much if the name they're given is the operator's legal name, so long as there is a consistent response from the pseudonym.
Especially if you have an easy to Google name (you're not "John Smith"), using a pseudonym for customer support means you can leave your job at the office at the end of the day and not worry about risk to yourself or your family.
Re: Alla Klein: a fake person in charge of customer support
#16It looks like the lesson to take from this is not to create a fake persona for customer service, but to provide exemplary support. Other than the customers looking for a date, I doubt that satisfaction would be lower if "Alla" was actually "Daniel".
In our case we shared the support load between two people behind one name.
Re: Alla Klein: a fake person in charge of customer support
#17Is Alla Klein a veiled reference to their search engine, Alkaline? Is this just a more elaborate version of "Let me Google that for you" ?
Yes. You could call it "lack of imagination" :)
Re: Alla Klein: a fake person in charge of customer support
#18I have to agree with martey here: the way you did support is fantastic, creating a fake persona is not. People like honesty and hate being fooled. If your customers found out about Alla, I think they would be very upset. Especially the ones who asked her out!
Now, 15 years later I totally agree. I definitely had all of the intentions of fooling clients into believing that I had a bigger company than I actually had - inventing personnel speaks for itself. I wouldn't do it again.
Re: Alla Klein: a fake person in charge of customer support
#19Ah, a page out of the Citibank playbook. ( http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870354560457540... )
Great story
Re: Alla Klein: a fake person in charge of customer support
#20Back in the early 90s, I worked for a very small (12-ish people) technical graphics software company. The CEO and lead coder would help with tech support calls when we were slammed, but he would use a pseudonym to make it appear that we were a larger, more established company than we were.
I think that it may have been a more appropriate facade then, but there are quite a few precedents for very small companies providing stellar service and support now so customers should be a little less anxious about buying boutique software.