Especially during a recession, it amazes me the utter contempt company call centers show toward their customers. I spend a lot of time on calls with technical support people, and it remains as irritating as ever to get to them. Once I get a live person, however, I can usually calm down.

I really hate hearing that “This call may be monitored or recorded for training or quality control purposes”. Especially right at the outset of a call. Maybe for my broker… (what broker?) when giving financial instructions. For all the “training” that is going on sitting in phone tree hell doesn’t seem to be getting any easier. And quality control purposes? It makes me uneasy that I’m being recorded at all.

On hold, I really hate hearing every 15 seconds that “We appreciate your patience, and thank you for waiting during this brief delay”. and “We know that you are very busy, we appreciate your call”. Or worse, blabbing on about the web site, or the new product, or alternate ways to contact us, or whatever. These constant interruptions makes it impossible to concentrate on other work while waiting. What ever happened to playing Vivaldi and not inserting commercial messages?

While there are “secret” phone numbers floating around the internet for various services, I can’t imagine a company would want these internal numbers published; they would get spammed quickly.

So, I’m holding for Fairpoint right now, and have had 5 dumb “Thank you for holding messages” in the previous minute.
“Thank you for holding, your call will be answered in just a moment”
“We know your time is important, and appreciate your patience while on hold”
“Every effort is being made to ensure that your wait is as short as possible… Thank you”
“Thank you for holding, someone will be right with you.”
“Your call is very important to us. Thank you for waiting and bearing with us during this brief delay”.

And then the cycle starts again. All this accompanied by ear-splitting muzak (tacky fake FM-synthesized saxophones.)

I was intrigued to see that VoIP Supply, the folks that sold me my Trixbox and my Polycom SIP phones are now offering SIP trunking and data services.

Don’t know how this stacks up against suppliers like VoicePulse. For one thing the pricing model is slightly different, with VoIP Supply looking for a minimum $25.00 per month, but with unlimited local and long-distance calling in the lower 48 states. VoicePulse, at least the version for Asterisk/Trixbox, was on a pre-paid model but charges 2 cents or so per minute.

What about the quality of these calls though? Maybe I’m just cranky, but I’ve had literally dozens of calls from vendors in the past year that clearly were low-quality VoIP calls. I would be appalled if my own calls to my clients and prospects sounded like many of these calls.

In one case, I was (supposedly) working with a sophisticated and highly-paid consultant who was using either Vonage or the Comcast VoIP. The guy couldn’t get out of his own way…I just couldn’t understand him, over multiple calls. How are we supposed to conduct business this way? And, where is the savings per month, at $25.00 or $125 or even $1025 per month that the person is supposedly saving, when as a result a client drops this person, after originally looking forward to a multi-thousand dollar contract? False economy.

Bottom Line: The landline isn’t dead yet. Use VoiP for long-distance calls to friends and family, and non-critical overseas calls. If there is any question, during a VoIP call, have a back-up landline available.

And if you have contracted out any functions to a call center (perish the thought…my local newspaper has done this to verify authorship of letters to the editor), be sure you get yourself on the receiving end of such calls to assess the quality. Nothing turns off customers and prospects more quickly then struggling with foreign-based tech support, heavily accented, with stupid calling scripts, and bad sound quality.