Washington Post article on customer service call center practices for Verizon and other telecom companies:
One thing the article failed to touch on is the reason for frequent transfer of calls. I work in a call center collections department for a television provider (not one mentioned in the article) and it does frankly work best to have reps in different departments that specialize in different areas. It would be overwhelming to try to adequately train phone reps in all areas a customer might call in or be called about. And that is even moreso the case for a company that handles both phone and TV and internet service. Its best to have reps that specialize and and are experts on one aspect, like tech support for cell phones, or past due billing, or retention so they can fully assist the customer in that area. If the customer has multiple concerns, it really is best to handle what that rep can handle and then transfer to the next expert. Ideally, what should happen is that companies would hire more reps so that hold times on each call or during each transfer would be smaller, or even non-existent. Customers would be far less likely to mind the transfer if they knew it was only a momentary delay, and not another 10 minutes of listening to bad music and hold messages.
