A call to a customer service department is, in many cases, enough to spike a customer's blood pressure.
There are long hold times, irritating music or, worse, repeated advertisements. After connecting to a call center, perhaps one staffed by reps with foreign accents, you will probably be rushed into a quick and easy "fix" that may, or may not, solve the problem, since many call centers rate their reps' success by how many customers they handle in a set amount of time.
Why are so many customer calls handled so poorly?
Peter Leppik is the CEO of Vocal Laboratories, also known as Vocalabs, a Minnesota company that digs deep into what some companies do right, and wrong, when it comes to customer-support calls. Rather than cast a broad net, his firm's approach to its National Customer Service Survey -- ongoing research on customer satisfaction with phone-based customer service -- focuses in depth on three vertical markets: computer technical support, mobile phone customer service and major national consumer banks.
What phone support should -- or can -- accomplish varies from industry to industry, sector to sector. For retailers, for example, customers may complain about being routed to a centralized support center. But the alternative, having staff answer phones at each location, distracts staff from being on the floor helping in-person customers.
The computer marketplace
The computer marketplace has its own unique challenges.
"There are a lot of things that can be fully automated," Leppik says. "But with tech support there are actually very few things that can be fully automated."
Apple, year after year, has been lauded by customers and consumer groups for having stellar customer support, and overall Vocalabs' research bears out that reputation.
"In most industries there are one or two companies that really get it," Leppik says. "In terms of tech support, Apple has a reputation that is justified. The statistics we have collected show that they are significantly ahead of their peers."
What Apple has done right, and where others flounder, is in the "strategic decision that they are going to compete on the basis of customer service," Leppik says.
It is a lesson other companies might want to emulate.
"You don't necessarily have to spend a whole lot more money providing a level of service, but what's important is that everybody on that front line understands that what the company does is important," Leppik says. "There are a lot of companies that do not feel like that customer service is important. They send the jobs to India. (For others), they are giving the message to employees that what they are doing is strategically important and the company cares and is watching."
Despite accolades, Apple does occasionally stumble and could be losing its edge as competitors make improvements.
Vocalab's 2011 surveys found that Apple continues to lead Dell and Hewlett-Packard in customer-service quality for phone-based technical support. But customers are reporting more problems with the automated part of their calls.
In telephone interviews immediately following a support call, 58% of Apple customers were "very satisfied" with the experience during the first six months of 2011, compared with 47% of Dell customers and 53% of HP customers. Apple's satisfaction score is down 15 points from a year ago, though, while HP has improved nine points over the past two years.
Customers remain highly satisfied with Apple's support agents, with 77% of customers in the first six months of last year being "very satisfied" with their technician, compared with 56% of Dell customers and 61% of HP customers.
The automated part of the call is a different story, with only 24% of Apple customers being "very satisfied" with that part of the experience, trailing Dell's 36% and HP's 40%. In this survey period, 40% of Apple customers reported a problem with the automated part of the call, nearly double the 21% rate from a year earlier.
"Apple used to be well ahead of the pack in tech support," Leppik said at the time of the study. "Now it would be fair to say that they are merely at the front of the pack. Apple used to lead on nearly every metric for support quality. Now there are several metrics where Apple is tied with its competition, or even trails."
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