This has not been a recording.
You know those phone calls you get, where there’s an awkward silence at first and then you hear a click and a call-center person says “Hello, may I speak to [mangled version of your name]“? That’s a call from a predictive dialing system.
A friend works at a major financial services company that has just put in such a system, from a bankrupt dot-com formerly known as Melita. The predictive dialer is a computer that sits at his desk. It calls people. As we’ll see below, it presents some problems.
He must sit and watch the screen carefully. Eventually it will flicker a bit, and this means that it has someone on the other end, probably already saying “Hello? Hello?” At this point the employee hits a button and starts speaking, saying “Hello this is Employee from Corporation. May I speak to…” However, the name is not yet available, since the dialer chokes and waits before showing you the name of his target.
If he gets through all of this, then it’s time to ask the person he’s reached “Do you still want the product or service you signed up for?” The contacts list is old, and most of the customers reached are not interested, or moved, or dead by now. Mutual annoyance results for the employee and the customer.
Let’s say we get past this point, and the person he’s called wants to know more about the product. Now my friend may have to do some extended data searching on his computer, or go to other parts of the office to look up data in printed books which are scattered everywhere. Here we encounter another problem. The predictive dialing machine occasionally will flash a little green arrow on its screen. If the call center employee doesn’t click the arrow with the mouse to indicate “I am still on this call”, the dialer disconnects the current call abruptly and moves on to the next one in the list. The idea is probably that dawdling employees will prolong calls or leave calls hanging in order to avoid work and that this is needed to keep them alert and at their desks, taking more calls. So, if he’s away across the room looking up important data for his customer in one of the books, the machine will automatically annoy the hell out of two customers, leaving him to explain to his new victim what happened and hope the previous one calls him back.
So! because bosses don’t trust employees to manage their time, we have a machine that is located slightly too far from the employee’s computer to let him use both; a machine that begins each call by annoying the customer; a machine that hangs up and goes to the next call if a dead man’s handle isn’t constantly held down; and a machine that forces our hero to stare at a flickering screen and won’t tell him the name of his customer until the customer is already angry.
A programmer friend of mine took a job at this company years ago, as a senior architect on a team trying to improve predictive dialing technology. He gave up pretty quickly. It’s easy to see why, if this is their idea of “managing customer relations”.