Can we go straight to security questions?
 Alison Rowland makes an interesting observation in one of her Tweets - The # of companies which ask for your card # as the 1st step in reporting a lost/stolen card is laughable. Go straight to security Q's, plz.
In my compliance days I used to come across this kind of thinking all the time. One company I worked for knew the only time its customers called was either when they found out they had an insurance policy, or they needed to make a claim. In both cases the number of people who had their policy number was close to zero. Yet what did a member of the call centre management insist on having as the first question the customer was asked?
What's worse is this kind of thinking can become so entrenched that the questions become more important than the customer. Security questions become less about confirming the customer's identify and more about a reason not to deal with them. My favourite was the auditor who insisted on 5 questions being asked of every caller, three of which required answers not available from the public domain (I nicknamed this the Myspace test - if you could answer it by looking at someone's Myspace profile it was public domain!)
The questions that became enshrined included "policy number", "level of benefit" and "date you took out the policy." As I've already observed the majority of callers were barely aware they had a policy, so how we expected them to answer these questions was beyond me.
The first questions you ask of your customers when they call is going to set the tone. If you ask a question that confuses or annoys then get ready for a rocky ride.
Previously on this blog...
the global leader in Contact Center Consolidation 2.0
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Setting up shop in a new country: beyond the website
Building a website for multiple languages is not just about translation. It is a critical business decision that has to be taken carefully.
Why call centre staff deserve your respect
If call centre staff set the first impression for your business, why do we treat them so badly?
Becoming a Specialist? A hard decision to make ...
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The quest for quality in Agile Software Development
Why quality assurance remains a central part of project management, regardless of the use of Agile methods
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