'Stay focused, Stay relevant, Stay on the line'
Proof positive we need more empathy in our society. I hate scripted call centers.... they make me sick. (for more read yesterdays post here)
"Australian officials promised Friday to overhaul emergency call procedures after a coroner faulted the system in a teenager's 2006 death from thirst while lost in a forest despite making multiple calls to a 911-type number.
Seventeen-year-old David Iredale called the "000" emergency line seven times from his mobile phone after getting lost during a school-organized hike in thick forest in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney.
He got through to ambulance officials five times, but each time was repeatedly asked for a street address if he wanted an ambulance sent to him."
More scripts. Instead of trained person attending to emergency phone calls, a call operator reading from scripts. Instead of human empathy we have raw procedure and bureaucracy. Instead of someone wanting to help, we have someone trying to "get the job done".
The death of this man can be traced to the wrong with "000" but also something fundamentally wrong in the way we operate our call centers and our businesses in general.
Businesses no longer train staff to think on their feet, to respond to real world issues, but rather we train them to read from scripts. To respond in pre-programmed ways that reduce them to blabbering robots. We do not allow them to respond in more open and 'humane' manner, instead we limit their responses, and as this example proves this can be deadly.
It comes of the arrogance that we can script a possible answer to every possible question a customer can ask. So when a customer calls for an ambulance, you ask for the street address, when a customer tells you he's lost in the woods, you STILL ask for the street address. You can't send an ambulance without a street address...... I'd like to meet the guy who came up with that procedure.
In fact, we criticize and 'discipline' staff who take risk by showing human empathy and emotion. From nurses who refuse to admit patients because of 'procedure' to 000 operators that ask for street addresses when a child reports that he's lost in the woods. They're all following procedure because other staff have been penalized for not following procedure.... to a strict message from upper management that non-compliance will not be tolerated, can we blame the folks for following procedure, even when common sense dictates procedure would be the wrong thing to do.
Following scripts and procedure act as an insurance policy, to 'streamline' our response to the world........ until the world decides to ask a question nobody thought of. You cannot have the answer to every question printed on a glossy A4 paper in front of a call center agent, but what you can have is a human being answering the a call for help, with empathy and humanity and a genuine intention to help.
That's my 2 cents. Don't spend it all in one place.
The death of this man can be traced to the wrong with "000" but also something fundamentally wrong in the way we operate our call centers and our businesses in general.
Businesses no longer train staff to think on their feet, to respond to real world issues, but rather we train them to read from scripts. To respond in pre-programmed ways that reduce them to blabbering robots. We do not allow them to respond in more open and 'humane' manner, instead we limit their responses, and as this example proves this can be deadly.
It comes of the arrogance that we can script a possible answer to every possible question a customer can ask. So when a customer calls for an ambulance, you ask for the street address, when a customer tells you he's lost in the woods, you STILL ask for the street address. You can't send an ambulance without a street address...... I'd like to meet the guy who came up with that procedure.
In fact, we criticize and 'discipline' staff who take risk by showing human empathy and emotion. From nurses who refuse to admit patients because of 'procedure' to 000 operators that ask for street addresses when a child reports that he's lost in the woods. They're all following procedure because other staff have been penalized for not following procedure.... to a strict message from upper management that non-compliance will not be tolerated, can we blame the folks for following procedure, even when common sense dictates procedure would be the wrong thing to do.
Following scripts and procedure act as an insurance policy, to 'streamline' our response to the world........ until the world decides to ask a question nobody thought of. You cannot have the answer to every question printed on a glossy A4 paper in front of a call center agent, but what you can have is a human being answering the a call for help, with empathy and humanity and a genuine intention to help.
That's my 2 cents. Don't spend it all in one place.
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