You should expect this threat environment for both yourself and your customers.
Wish more banks would do what Stripe does here: “Log into your account and use the ‘auth a support rep’ feature. I will read you some digits, you verify they match, then read your digits to me.”
Wish more banks would do what Stripe does here: “Log into your account and use the ‘auth a support rep’ feature. I will read you some digits, you verify they match, then read your digits to me.”
(Banks don’t do this because an extremely material portion of their business still does not use the website or app or cannot quickly access them when called, but this is less likely to be true about your customers than theirs.)
And yeah, nobody on the phone is who they say they are until they have given you an internal extension that you can route from a known-good phone number. Their call center or similar almost certainly supports incoming calls and temporarily pausing a queue while waiting for one.
(We called it “auxing out” since pushing AUX on the phone would put you in the auxiliary queue, which was never assigned to, and thus the only way your phone would ring was if someone dialed your extension specifically.)
“We?”
Paid for university doing telephone, email, fax, and website order entry for a large American office supply store’s catalog operation. It sold office paper, pens, you know, the usual staples.
Paid for university doing telephone, email, fax, and website order entry for a large American office supply store’s catalog operation. It sold office paper, pens, you know, the usual staples.
“Website order entry? Come on, a computer handled that?”
Supposing you entered a web order shipping to James Smith, Cat Walked Across Keyboard, Illinois 60608, you could expect to either get it because I could find previous orders or get a call to ask to double check address.
Supposing you entered a web order shipping to James Smith, Cat Walked Across Keyboard, Illinois 60608, you could expect to either get it because I could find previous orders or get a call to ask to double check address.
I should tell stories sometime. One quick one: I was very, very used to getting told off for being a salesman when calling companies to tell them that their order had been received and was going to be shipped. There’s an art to not antagonizing customer’s coworker while still...
... making sure customer understands either that the order will be shipped or why not. (Catalog business! Customers could routinely ask for things not fulfillable, like “Give me 6000 pens.” w/o a part number or clear indication from history that they wanted Bic black 12packs.)
Most times I ever called someone back was a non-customer who had sent 400 pages to the fax machine that fed into my group. Non-customer was a lawyer.
Argument that finally got me through the person to answer the phone:
Argument that finally got me through the person to answer the phone:
“I can read you enough from fax to convince you I am not making this up but the contents of it suggests that I shouldn’t read any more than I have already. Please get Bob on the line so I can tell him this did not end up where he intended it to end up. I will destroy our copy.”
Another one: VP of HR comes to my desk and says “Patrick! It said on your job application you speak some Japanese. That true?” “Two semesters, sir.” “That’s two semesters more than anyone else. Great. Here’s a faxed order; we called back and got a Japanese speaker. Go.”
“That must have been extremely stressful.”
Off-the-charts but luckily you learn the words for “order” and “tomorrow” in your first year so if your university taught you polite Japanese and the customer has no questions you know *just barely enough* to handle that phone call ;)
Off-the-charts but luckily you learn the words for “order” and “tomorrow” in your first year so if your university taught you polite Japanese and the customer has no questions you know *just barely enough* to handle that phone call ;)
