ungleich-staticcms/content/u/blog/an-alternative-to-annoying-phone-hotlines/contents.lr

title: An alternative to annoying phone hotline systems
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pub_date: 2020-11-29
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author: Nico Schottelius
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twitter_handle: NicoSchottelius
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_discoverable: no
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abstract:
Making technologies improve our life
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body:

## The phone hotline

If you have a problem with your contract, if you want to have some
information about your product or you just want to change some
detail. By default, many companies nowadays offer something that we
call "hotline". Or in other words: a voice based communication that
allows to easily queue people.

The motivation and how it works is rather clear: there are a finite
number of employees, each of which can only talk to one person, so if
the number of requests is more than number of employees, then you are
stuck in the queue. However this post is not about the annoyance of
waiting in a queue and enduring little quality down sampled classic
music pieces.

No, in this post I want to address a different fundamental problem:
every time you call, you start a fresh conversation. You are likely to
talk to a different person with a different background and from a
customer perspective you usually don't have any trail of previous
communication. Actually, the company you are calling might record (and
correctly announce it before) the call. However as a customer you
cannot. Often it is also impossible to correspond with the company by
email, so all written communication has to be sent in letters. In 2020!

Looking at it this way clearly shows how much power imbalance the
innovation of the phone hotline is causing. But it could easily be
different.


## The classic way

You might or might not remember when companies used to be smaller and
you would request a service with the counterpart in person. Both of
you know each other and are fully aware of each other responsibilities
("I give you money, you give me a product or service") and also of the
support process (A: "It did not work" - B: "I'll fix it (also because
you are my neighbour and it's really not good for our relationship if
I don't").

As you can easily imagine this does not scale nor work easily in big
companies where staff is rotated or fluctuating. The old value system
of being responsible on a personal basis cannot easily be
transferred. This also means that the classic way is much more
expensive in terms of time and resources, but the responsibilities are
enforced by social relationships.

## Mixing the two?

So we could say that they are two extremes: one very personal, high
quality, expensive and the other - well, you get the picture. Is it
possible to improve the current situation and how can we get the best
of the two worlds? Before answering this question, let me give you a
short background of where we are and how we work at ungleich, to show
you how these approaches can naturally merge.
show how

## ungleich @ Digital Glarus

ungleich is based in [Digital Glarus](/u/projects/digital-glarus/),
a really old mountain valley in Switzerland. Majority of its buildings
are very old (I'd guess most are built prior to 1900, many even much
older), major businesses are industry, farming and also tourism. Many
people here get up before 6 and start working latest by 8.

We from ungleich on the other hand are working in IPv6 only
networks connected by our own fiber or with long range wifi links. Our
working hours are very flexible, can be morning, day, night, week,
weekend - we are free to choose. Our topics are very technical by
nature.

These two approaches can contradict, but they can also work together
very well. Like the two ways of communication.

Interestingly our experience here is that they can easily be combined:
many people living in Digital Glarus have what we call an "old value
system". If you offer a service towards people in Digital Glarus, you
need to take responsibility and be trustworthy. Otherwise the word
will get out within a few days and social enforcement will result in
no more work for you.

While this might sound cruel, you could actually call this "social
quality assurance".

And how does this look like in reality? People here want and need to
be convinced that you are trustworthy. You are having (pre Corona) in
person meetings, one person will make a protocol and then later send
it for verification back to the other party. If something is noted
incorrectly, the protocol will be amended and again verified.


## Combining old values and new communication

Let's come back to the original problem: we shifted from high quality,
individual services to mass produced in-transparent
communication. Technically and organisational, it is not necessary to
provide a worse product or service if it is mass produced.

So let's go back to the hotline problem: we advocate a simple change
that costs little for companies to implement but restores trust and
quality in communication:

**Every support hotline should be, by default, accompanied by a text based
ticketing system that sends users a protocol and let's them interact
with you on a text basis.**

So how does this work? The agent in the call center will make notes of
the phone call - they are already done nowadays, but unavailable for
you. Some of these notes might be internal ("The customer does not
know the difference between the power button and the reset button -
always advise to push the button on the right") and are not for
sharing. However, **the key points of the conversation must be sent to
the customer**. This way, as a customer I can easily react and correct
statements that have been incorrectly recorded. With a trail.

Furthermore in a later stage, I as a customer, also have a trail and
the ability to respond to the previous conversation by text, giving me
the opportunity to add to the trail.

Obviously, our suggestion here is not rocket science. In fact, it is a
very easy, natural and cost effective measure to be more transparent
and to built mutual trust.

Some companies might try to argue that it is too complex or too
expensive to implement such a system. To prevent that argument from
being true, we have added a [Hosted Support
System](/u/products/hosted-support-system/) to our product
list. Nobody needs to get it from us, but anybody can. And thus there
is no excuse, not to have it implemented.