Those are some excellent points and thanks for posting them. Calling customers back can certainly be difficult in a lot of call centers and you addressed many of the difficulties in your comment. Ideally, managers would create an environment in which calling the customer back would be feasible and not work against customer service representatives, but that is only true in a minority of call centers.

Now I will admit, all of these are subject to abuse by one or more parties including decision making executives who control the big picture.

I used to get upset when I didn’t get a call back, but since I have worked in a call center for several years, I know that the issue is not a cut and dry issue. For all of those who think that the customer service rep is being lazy, walk a mile in our shoes.

1. when a call drops, often another caller is on the other end. How would you feel if you just got to a rep and he/she placed you on hold to deal with a previous customer? Frankly, several times I have had a call come in after a dropped call while I’m finishing my notes and I handle that situation. When I’m finished, I try to call the customer back but get a busy signal. I look on the account only to find that they have already called back. Most customers do not wait to get a call back and it is unlikely that every dropped call is going to be followed by a break enough to call a customer back.

2. In many call centers, a rep who calls a customer back loses, because that outbound call goes against his/her call matrix. I think that is bull, but the rep suffers for doing this.

3. Often queues spike at anytime and dropped calls occur quite often during those time periods. Some induced by reps and others by the system. The law of averages yields that the more something is interacted, the more you have a chance of failure. Now I’m not referring to the normal times when there is a high call volume, but those special times when something seems to be wrong or different. These could be an outage in the cell network, an influx of calls on a relatively new product, or pre rollout of something new.

4. customer service reps have no true input into the process. they are drones. They have to follow the rules or that seat will fill with someone else. Call centers have an extremely high rate of turnover, thus, overhead is always high in the customer service department.

5. We work in an ever changing dynamic often with rules changing from week to week, yet we’re supposed to be experts in our field.

6. To deal with a customer service rep, get to the point. We don’t need stories about your dog just to hear in the end that you need help installing windows on a computer. Customer service reps are under pressure from both the company and the customers and often without help from either side to resolve the problem. Common sense it should be common sense that a customer knows his/her account information. It should be common sense that the customer read the manual for their product. Sometimes we have to train customers on things not necessarily covered by my company.