I got called by Dell today. Several times I had to correct the person on how to pronounce my name. Cockburn is a 700+ year old Scottish name that is pronounced Coburn. It is even advertised on national TV, Cockburn's special reserve is the UK's best selling Port (Fortified wine) and every advert details how to pronounce the name.
Yet I get countless contact centres who ask me for my name, I pronounce it correctly and then they pronounce it the way it is written in front of them, seemingly deaf to the fact that the owner of the name has just told them how to pronounce it. Some even say "well it must be spelled incorrectly here, I'll just change it for you", not realising that doing so would then mislabel my addressed mail.
Goodness knows what difficulties they have with pronunciation with some of the more difficult names from Eastern Europe, Africa, Arab speaking countries and so on. How embarrassing it must be for those customers and how needlessly difficult for contact centre operators.
How much simpler life would be if the customer record had a separate field where the phonetic spelling of the customer's name could be written in.
At last, no more mispronunciations. It also has the other advantage that if the company ever starts using voice recognition then the phonetic encoding of the field is likely to be more accurate than the original.
Why does no one do this? Sounds like a good idea to me.
Craig
Total Pageviews
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Popular Posts
-
My article about Dyson's breakdown problems made the front page of reddit and hopefully this article on Bosch will do so too because m...
-
Every time I go to the post office there's a queue. No matter how much they try and keep the queue length down, inevitably you get stuck...
-
I've been having a busy time over on the Cambrian House site lately. Check out my profile and the full set of awards I completed last ...
-
An article on how Agile can sit alongside PRINCE2 and where DSDM Atern fits in. In 2007, I put "used an Agile/PRINCE2 development str...
-
It has always surprised me that in the US, where holidays are valued and children get about 6 weeks more annual holiday than the UK, that ad...
-
The UK Government Digital Service (GDS) has just had a reboot . However will it be value for money and deliver its objectives? Will th... -
I had the unpleasant experience of trying to uninstall McAfee SecurityCenter today. I needed to install it to test a website that was incorr...
-
Argos (a top 5 e-commerce site in the UK ) reports on its website when you go to buy something: Remember, you don't need to register t...
-
Dyson's motto is "100% suction all the time" or "The vacuum that doesn't lose suction". The consumers' asso...
-
In contrast to my usual relaxed drive to work I was on the motorway today. Tailgaiting seems to have got worse. It's not enough to be ...
1 comment:
I hear you on that one! UGH... my name is difficult too... every first day of school I would wait for the pause and they would be twisting and turning the paper to figure it out! I already said... that is me... here!
Post a comment