Technology; it's great when it works...

This morning I called a very large organization and got an auto-answer system. It told me what button to press for the staff directory. When I pressed that number a lovely female voice invited me to simply say the name of the person with whom I wanted to speak.

The person I was asking for had a name that was about as complicated to pronounce as “Tony Smith”…so we’ll use “Tony Smith” for this story.

I asked for Mr. Smith and a moment later the machine said, “Did you say (again not the actual name) Diego Rodriguez Del Sol?”

I slowly said “No, To-ny Sm-ith.”

There was a pause and the voice came back asking “Did you say Rita Andreason?”

I replied again, “No, Toooo-nyyyy Smmmmiiittthh”

A moment later the voice came back; “I’m sorry you are having problems, please try again later.” and it hung up.

I called back only to find out that there was no operator and was put back into the same loop a second time.

This is not an isolated incident. I make a lot of calls every day and this, or a something similar, happens to me far more frequently than I would like to think. Also, I’ve talked to other sales people who have had the same stories about automatic answering services.

The point is simply this; I was calling as a sales person so I’m going to be very patient and easy to work with. But had I been calling as a customer with a pocket full of money to spend at this company, I might not be so patient.  After being told “I’m sorry you are having problems, please try again later,” (hang up) I very likely would have become a competitors client.

So am I anti-auto-answer? Not at all! But if you have a company that uses auto-answer technology don’t just assume it is all working fine, check it periodically and if there is an issue get it fixed.

We all lose sales from time to time, it’s part of doing business, but to lose a customer because a machine hung up on them, that’s damn near unforgivable.