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Contact Center Yuks, With a Point
Let's face it: Contact centers have always been comedy gold. English majors of a certain age will fondly remember studying Aristophanes' seminal play What Was That Account Number Again?, while Baby Boomers still trade battered VHS copies of The Honeymooners episode "Let Me Route You to the Moon, Alice." And of course we all enjoyed the recent box-office smash Burn After Listening to An Endless Loop of "The Girl From Ipanema" While Being Regularly Reminded, "Your Call Is Very Important to Us."
Okay, so maybe your own call center experiences have been less Groucho than grouchy. Not Some Like It Hot so much as Some Like It Not. More Drears than Cheers. (Thanks, I'm here all week. Enjoy the veal, and don't forget to tip your waitress.)
But that's not to say there's no laughs to be had in this area, as Genesys has recently demonstrated.
The company has rolled out three (so far) spoofy "Dr. Bill" videos addressing various call center issues. Presented as a Dr. Phil type talkshow (though, disappointingly, the guy playing Dr. Bill doesn't have the same Hank-Hill-Underwater Texas drawl as the original model), the 3-minute clips illustrate common contact center problems.
One examines a couple facing marital problems because of bad customer service; another details a call center agent who feels "inadequate" because he's always apologizing to customers; the third introduces Bob, a business executive whose call center strategy includes charging callers a fee ("That'll help weed out the whiners.").
While not necessarily laugh-out-loud funny -- and certainly not a patch on John Cleese's legendary Video Arts training films -- the Genesys series does the job of poking gentle fun at contact center foibles, getting across its points without beating you over the head with them.
I'd be curious to know what others think of these clips -- and if there are other good examples out there of tackling contact center issues with humor. After yesterday's Götterdämmerung on Wall Street, I figure we could all use a laugh.
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