A Deadly Heresy for a Help Desk

I came across a post by an agent in a Help Desk call center, called Stupidity, The New Heresy. He had posted an image called "Happy Bunny" that I am showing here and made the following remarks:

[This picture] reminds me so much of my attitude towards the people that call me, day in and day out. If they would only grow a smidgen-size of intelligence in the wasted cavity where the normal human should show be, I would be a lot nicer to them.

I have got to tell you that this attitude is deadly and you have to change your agent's mindset. If you allow this attitude to be pervasive among your agents, you will continually encounter escalated customer complaints, loss of customers, and if you are an outsourced call center, you can jeopordize the entire account.

What is so deadly about this attitude? Consider his statement:

If they would only grow a smidgen-size of intelligence in the wasted cavity where the normal human should show be, I would be a lot nicer to them.

If they were smarter, I would be nicer to them. What a cop-out! This completely eliminates any accountablity on the part of the agent for proper customer service - "Hey, it is not my fault I was rude to them - they are stupid."

How will that customer ever grow in intelligence? It is something outside of the control of the agent or the company. The customer's intelligence is what it is and the company and the agent need to decide to provide a service that meets that intelligent level and deliver it so the customer feels valued and appreciated.

If you had to call this agent, and he responded in a manner that essentially said, "Hey, dumb ___ss, if you weren't so dumb, you wouldn't be bothering me. But since you are, let me help your sorry little self..."

Would you feel valued? Would you feel like you wanted to do business with this company again?

If you do find this attitude among some of your agents, ask them to define what they consider "dumb questions". You may find that there really are confused customers out there and maybe you as a company did something to make them confused. Did you send out poorly written instructions? Does your product really have some legitimate flaws that make a lot of people call a help desk? Is your marketing selling some feature that you really can't support?

Even if your company did do something that confused your customers, your help desk should never be allowed to foster and tolerate such a condesending attitude toward your customers. You need to either change the mindset (difficult but possible to do) or you need to filter out the promoters of this destructive attitude.