Bill Gates saying that dissatisfied customers are a company's best source of information and inspiration is well known. In fact, a satisfied customer tends not to be a herald of their satisfaction, but a dissatisfied customer is certainly a propagator of their dissatisfaction.  Ifthe problem is attended to and resolved, not only is the situation of dissatisfaction reversed, but faults that would otherwise have continued to occur are discovered, generating an opportunity to resolve them.

One of the most recurring trends of the last decade has been the replacement of callcenter operators by automation, which has recently culminated in bots and is believed to be further enhanced by artificial intelligence.

NOS recently launched a TV ad with the theme “Primas” (cousins), drawing attention to the fact that customer service in the business segment is provided by customer managers and not by “primas” (cousins), namely prima 1 if, prima 2se... prima 3 se...

By opting for humor, NOS wanted to ride the wave the other way around: where everyone opts for automation that exasperates any human being because, in most situations, they can't solve a customer's problem, wasting endless time, NOS is once again putting people in the place of machines and putting the customer back at the center of attention. I can't praise the initiative more highly.

Recently, in one of the thousand contacts we have to make to resolve inefficiencies in organizations that cause problems for customers, I spent more than 25 minutes listening to a recording that said: your call is important to us.

How can it be important if you're kept waiting for 25 minutes?

Perhaps it would make much more sense to say: we don't care about your call for anything.The time you're wasting while you're on hold doesn't concern us, while our company time is managed in such a way as to save as much as possible, at the expense of yours.

If that were the case, I as a customer would still be annoyed, but at least they didn't have to add a lie (or two). Because actually keeping a customer waiting andthen saying that their call is important is not only a lie, it assumes that customers are fools.

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