

Alla Klein: a fake person in charge of customer support - dblock
http://code.dblock.org/alla-klein-a-fake-person-in-charge-of-customer-support

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ben1040
I remember setting up a website back in the 90s for a construction equipment
company. They had no way of easily tracking leads from the website versus
people who just saw them in the yellow pages or something. So, their solution
was to have a fake salesman's name on the website.

People would call and ask for him, and the caller would be told he was out of
the office and someone else would be happy to help out. Meanwhile they'd know
right off the bat how that customer got their number.

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MartinCron
The first company I worked at would advertise with different extensions, such
as (800)555-1212 x 123 in different publications, when we answered the phone
and somebody asked for x123, we would just log what they requested and say "I
can help you with that..."

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matdwyer
I think the point of creating a "fake" person is so everyone involved can
provide the support when ever they are available, and it looks like a unified
source. I've done this a few times and it works very well, rather then having
different people constantly responding.

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andrewflnr
Actually, in this case, they made sure only one person was on a thread at a
time, to make sure "Alla" had a consistent voice.

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gergles
Ah, a page out of the Citibank playbook.
([http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870354560457540...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703545604575407160128452040.html))

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rokhayakebe
Great story

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lanstein
And Danny Sullivan is quoted!

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martey
It 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".

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jguimont
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.

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GuiA
I'm Guillaume. I regularly tell people to just call me "William" :)

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smokinn
William is my uncle, not me. When people struggle I just tell them it's 2
syllables: Gui and Ohm. They go oh! and get it right from then on.

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mattcofer
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."

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jaylevitt
When AOL was Q-Link, we did something similar; all of our newsletters were
written by "Jenny Crocker" (Betty's daughter, we decided). It was convenient
to have a representative character that always spoke in a consistent voice,
yet could be staffed by multiple people. At first we were coy about whether
she was real, but it eventually became an in-joke among the entire user base.

Ronald McDonald isn't just one clown, either.

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evanhamilton
I 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!

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tomkarlo
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.

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evanhamilton
I'd argue that a pseudonym is /very/ different from having all support
responses come from a a fake person. "tomkarlo" could be a pseudonym and I'd
be fine interacting with you...but if I find out that "tomkarlo" is actually
12 employees at Microsoft posting on boards across the web, I'd be very upset.

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MartinCron
Back 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.

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lurker17
Interesting. Our CEO makes a point of identifying himself by name when he
jumps on a support call or email. I figured he figures it makes people feel
special, or he just likes being straightforward.

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bitwize
In Boston there is a column for gay men to write anonymously to for help and
advice with their medical issues (especially sexual and psychological).

It's called "Ask Dr. Cox". (hurr, hurr)

"Dr. Cox" is actually a pseudonym for a small group of physicians who respond
to the questions. Nevertheless the idea of having a single "name" and "face"
to address your concerns to seems to be working -- and it helps these doctors
contribute to a much-needed service without occupying too much time from any
one of them.

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lurker17
Is that known to be more effective than "Ask the Docs?"

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jhensley
Is Alla Klein a veiled reference to their search engine, Alkaline? Is this
just a more elaborate version of "Let me Google that for you" ?

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dblock
Yes. You could call it "lack of imagination" :)

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akshat
We had done something like this for my first attempt at a startup. We had this
product in India, and my name as well as those of our co-founders can be
spelled in many ways. This can be confusing. So we picked a name which is like
the most common name in India, which nobody gets right.

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Riverbed
The Alla Klein approach is also used when CS moves to Bangalore behind the
scenes...

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marquis
>She was also asked on a couple of dates.

Maybe things were different in the 90s (well, I know they were) but
celebrating the success of your support offering based on gender isn't great
advice to offer others.

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dougaitken
Wow, Myabe it depends on the business but I used to work in customer service
in a retail company's call centre and we used to send out letters with our own
names on them.

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FreshCode
We have someone like this. Her name is Christine.

:)

