
Y Combinator Challenge #24 - A Buffer Against Bad Customer Service - drm237
http://astartupaday.wordpress.com/2008/09/16/y-combinator-challenge-24-a-buffer-against-bad-customer-service/
======
mattmaroon
"I’m horrible at dealing with customer service people, but my wife is
ridiculously great at it. I don’t know how she does it, but she’ll get on the
phone and within minutes we’ll have crazy discounts on our cable or phone
bills, instant returns with no extra fees, etc, etc.. "

I'm pretty good at this too. The trick is to be nice to them. Ask them how
their day is going while they're waiting for the computer to update, etc.
Basocally read How To Win Friends and Influence People and apply.

All day long they have people yelling at them over stuff that isn't their
fault. A few minutes of kindness to them is like a life raft to a drowning
kid. They'll often do whatever they can to keep you happy and on the phone,
because they know that as soon as you're gone, you'll be replaced by some old
lady screaming at them about their broken computer.

Reserve all of your negative emotion for telemarketers.

~~~
kleneway
Ha, nice. My wife's trick is to make it as non-personal as possible. "I know
it's not your fault, but <insert problem>. I'm not mad at you, but you might
understand my frustration at <restate problem>.". Also - stay on the line as
long as it takes...most of them are measured on how fast their turnaround is
and they're not allowed to directly hang up on you (as long as you're not
being hostile or overly rude), so eventually they'll do whatever it takes to
get you off the phone.

~~~
mattmaroon
Right, the non-personal thing is key. They just answer the phones all day and
try to make up for other people's mistakes. Most of them are sensitive to your
problem, they just don't want to be unfairly treated as if they were the root
of it.

------
andrewf
I'm reminded of this Australian ad:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnN7c5wZKBM>

------
defen
I understand that in India they have, essentially, professional waiters-in-
line for dealing with the various bureaucracies.

------
jasonlbaptiste
welcome back! So pretty interesting and novel idea. Do you think the amount of
reps could really scale up over time? Oh, how much easier it might be to have
someone bitch to fedex when my package is lost.

~~~
kleneway
Thanks man, good to back. I didn't go into too many details on this one, but I
think the "secret sauce" to scaling this idea would happen by actually making
deals with the major customer service call centers on the back end. That way,
instead of the customer service agents having to call the same 800 numbers and
wait on hold like the rest of us, they could get a direct line to a dedicated
service rep at the call center who could quickly resolve issues for the
agents. So what would be a 20 minute call for a customer could only be a 2-3
minute call for the agent.

~~~
eru
Or how about organizing a peer-to-peer aspect? I'll do your problem if you'll
do mine? (For example if I know how to deal with company A and you know how to
deal with government B.)

------
andreyf
Um, virtual assistants? PG was talking about lots of HTML parsing, I think.

~~~
kleneway
Yeah, as I go through the list it's interesting to see the items where PG is
outlining a broad problem (i.e. #7) versus something where he is throwing out
hints around a solution that he's thought of. For this one, I kept coming back
towards something like applying the Kayak/Sidestep model to airline miles. But
I'm not quite sure how that would work, so I decided to go a completely
different course. I agree with you, though, there's probably a much better
html-parsing-based idea that could come out of this one.

