Please tell me no.

As I’m rushing out of the house this morning. Coat on. Purse, computer, keys and dog in hand and the phone rings. The landline at the house. Who calls a landline anymore? It must be important.

Hello?

May I speak with Julie please?

This is she.

How are you today?

Fine thanks, and you?

I’m great, thanks for asking. This is so and so from such and such car warranty company. I’m calling about your 2007 blah blah car to see if you know it’s no longer in warranty and would you like to add an extended warranty for this car.

Seeing as that car was totaled in 2009, I’m pretty sure I don’t care if it has a warranty or not. Have a nice day.

(click)

Not even thanks for your time or goodbye. I try to recognize that this lady is just doing her job. But she was preventing me from going to my job. I had to find that happy medium between you’re a human too, but I know you’re wasting my time, so let’s just get this moving along.

Now let’s take this apart. I have no fantasy that my contact information is safe or secured or private in any way. I’m way past that.

The car, was a lease, in 2007. Seven years ago. How hard is it to write your query to say exclude if type equals lease? Or exclude if lease term has expired?

Add some simple integration to your CRM. This car has not been “mine” for FIVE YEARS. Can’t you run a quick check against current registrations and see it’s no longer registered? Or do a darn Carfax report to show titled type equals totaled? Then add that line item to your query for your call agents.

And why not add an item to their call script…once she knows I no longer have THAT car, why not start a conversation about what cars I might have now? Could she help me with those? This automation stuff is not that hard.

I just get frustrated when companies fail at the most basic parts of customer relationship management. I know how easy it is to make small and impactful changes. Sure, there’s some pretty big things we can do too, but save that for the big companies, I get it. But for me, this call this morning, came from a tiny call center. With one day of consulting from someone that knows a little about software and process automation and the differences could be huge. And heck, it doesn’t even matter what software you choose. Obviously if you’re here you know I’m building this in my head in Dynamics CRM, but really any of them could do this basic CRM.