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Sunday, March 05, 2006 10:11:17 AM
DD: How Much Profit Is Lurking in That Cellphone?
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/business/yourmoney/05frenzy.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/business/yourmoney/05frenzy.html
By RICHARD SIKLOS NY Times Published: March 5, 2006
IN some ways, wireless is the new China. Both are huge, largely untapped markets for news and entertainment media companies. And media executives have made a lot of dreamy statements about both of these markets and funneled a lot of effort into them. Yet neither has yet translated into a significant new businesses for established companies, which are feverishly seeking ways to grow in a world of technological and competitive obstacles.
Lloyd Miller
While China's media moment seems eternally right around the corner, mobile may be approaching its own at last — it may just take a lot longer and be less earth-shaking than the recent hoopla may suggest. Last week, there were announcements of three ventures by media companies looking to insinuate themselves into the hip pockets of teenagers and their elders. All three are part of a deluge of wireless moves and offer glimpses at new ways of both distributing existing products and using big-media power to start new businesses.
In one of the deals unveiled last week, the MTV Networks unit of Viacom said it would sell mobile versions of its MTV, VH1, CMT and Comedy Central channels to Sprint customers; the services will include video clips from shows including "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart."
The most intriguing announcement came from a tentacle of the News Corporation, in the form of Mobizzo, which is essentially a kind of online studio and store for selling games, ring tones and adornments for mobile handsets.
CBS, meanwhile, which is perhaps best known for its notably unhip television network, plans to start a venture along the lines of Mobizzo in a few weeks. For now, CBS unveiled a plan to sell multimedia message alerts nationwide that will play short video clips on some cellphones. In a way, CBS aims to show that it wants to compete in this arena along with MTV, NBC and ESPN — rivals that have been making their content available across a range of new mobile formats and gizmos.
What is significant about the News Corporation and CBS announcements is that both companies plan to sell their new services directly to consumers. Instead of buying these services through a mobile phone carrier, users can go directly to Web sites or can send text messages to an address that will instantly sign them up for, say, a "Napoleon Dynamite" wallpaper that they can use to amuse themselves and their friends. In the case of CBS's new service, users can sign up to pay 99 cents a month for news alerts from CBS News, and $3.99 for alerts from the syndicated program "Entertainment Tonight."
For media companies, direct selling is just one advantage that mobile technologies have over other forms of distributing information and entertainment, including the Internet.
Another is that young consumers, in particular, have come to view their mobile phones as fashion accessories, giving rise to a whole new category of personal media products, such as ring tones and avatars, which are animated images of oneself that are sent to friends with messages. (If you have to ask what these are, you probably don't need one.)
A third advantage is that anything bought through a mobile phone — even if not purchased through your service provider itself — can be automatically added to your monthly phone statement, avoiding the bother of having to enter a credit card number.
Add them up and these features illustrate why mobile media could be a big deal: they turn consumption into both a fashion statement and an impulse purchase, while further letting the genie of what-I-want-when-I-want-it out of the bottle.
This has proved to be the case in other countries that have more advanced mobile networks. Much has been made, for instance, about how the United States' mobile market compares with markets in places like South Korea — where users enjoy all sorts of interactive features and pristine television signals on their handsets — and how wireless carriers here have invested some $10 billion to catch up quickly. It's only understandable that established media companies, as well as the Internet titans Google and Yahoo, want to try to capture everything from the growth of the ring tone and games markets to emerging forms of mobile advertising.
The nagging question about all the activity around mobile — the China factor, you might say — is whether the United States will embrace these new products the way other nations have.
As for the China analogy, think about this: A conventional view among American media executives is that if the Chinese government would only allow a truly progressive market for information and ideas (with attendant copyright protections), foreign media companies would flourish.
But that assumes that China has a latent entertainment consumption culture as powerful as the one that drives the United States economy, and that its citizens' tastes are very similar to those of Americans.
It is absurd that only 20 new Hollywood movies are allowed into China's theaters each year. Yet even if audiences there could legitimately go to a theater to watch "Brokeback Mountain," "Munich" and the other contenders for tonight's Academy Awards, they might not be as interested in doing so as both the censors in Beijing and the moguls in New York would like to think.
Similarly, it would be prudent to temper expectations about the prospects for wireless media in the United States — especially until it becomes clear how much people are willing to spend on these newfangled services and the fancy phones needed to use them.
CONSIDER a survey, released last week by the banking firm RBC Capital Markets, of nearly 1,000 people aged 21 to 65. When asked to respond "true" or "false" to the statement "There are many new and cool wireless products coming on the market that I am eager to purchase," 71 percent said "false." And when asked to respond to "I am not interested in watching TV programs or movies on my handheld device," 76 percent said "true."
Of course, even if this view of consumer desires proves accurate in the short term, there is plenty of business to be done selling new and cool wireless products for 20-odd percent of the 200 million cellphones currently in use nationwide.
And surveys about nascent products don't always tell the whole story. Most people probably didn't sit around thinking that they wanted to watch video clips on their computers or send instant messages to one another until these services hit critical mass.
For now, though, it seems premature to set the buzz for wireless at anything but the low setting.
******************************************************************************************************************************
Suddenly, an Industry Is All Ears
By MATT RICHTEL AUSTIN, Tex., March 3 —
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/04/technology/04service.html
Michael Stravato for The New York Times
Brendan McGahan, 26, rips off his headset and darts from his cubicle looking for a supervisor. "I'm getting close to an escalation," he says over the drone of other cubicle dwellers.
Just out of the Air Force, Mr. McGahan recently landed a job that entails keeping frustrated Cingular Wireless customers from losing it. He is a trainee in the customer service center here, and he has a live one on the line: the caller complains he cannot hear well on his mobile phone and is demanding a free replacement.
Help arrives seconds later from a hovering supervisor, who studies the customer's account on a computer screen and advises Mr. McGahan to offer a $50 rebate for a new phone and 500 extra minutes of talk time.
Across the wireless phone industry, there is a feeling of urgency. The big cellphone companies are eager to improve their customer support and service, an area that was an afterthought just a short time ago.
From computer makers to credit card issuers to airlines, customer service is a vital aspect of attracting and retaining business, but few industries do it as poorly as cellphone companies, says Jon Anton, director of the Center for Customer-Driven Quality at Purdue University. Their services are so bad that they "are inefficient at being ineffective," Mr. Anton said.
Their collective mediocrity is becoming more costly as customers leave each month by the hundreds of thousands. Now that most Americans own cellphones, growth for mobile carriers means not just finding new subscribers but holding onto existing ones. And yet, some 45 million customers, or about 20 percent of all subscribers, switch providers each year, according to the Yankee Group, a market research firm. And sometimes, as in the case of Denise Ferrari, they swear they will never go back.
Ms. Ferrari, 41, a saleswoman for a home security company in the San Francisco Bay Area, dropped Cingular in 2002 after having a problem first with dropped calls and then with customer service. She said she called numerous times in vain to get her deposit back.
"Burn me once, I'm gone," said Ms. Ferrari, who now gets service from Sprint Nextel.
Customers need little provocation to make an exit. "We're at the point where getting a phone isn't a big deal and transferring a number isn't a big deal," said Esteban Kolsky, a research director for Gartner, a market research firm. "Once the business is a commodity, as it has become, customer service is the differentiator."
That fact is not lost on Cingular, which tends to fall in the bottom half of independent customer service surveys. "It's no secret that the wireless industry doesn't have the world's greatest reputation for customer service," said Larry Carter, a senior vice president of Cingular.
"We're in a place we're not happy with," Mr. Carter said. But "there's been a very concerted effort on our part to change the way we interact with customers."
Cingular's mentoring program for recruits like Mr. McGahan is an example of the tactics the big players are trying. In general, carriers are being more liberal with credits, particularly for high-paying customers. They are also introducing customer feedback initiatives and moving call center operations in-house, rather than relying on outside contractors.
Still, wireless providers, which until recently focused largely on building networks and amassing customers, are playing catch-up in the customer service game, a challenge aggravated by the fast pace of technology change. Many cellphones now have music players and cameras, and can also be used to surf the Internet and send text and e-mail messages.
In the case of Cingular, its own efforts to improve are furthest along in the Austin call center, which employs 750 representatives who take calls until midnight from their gray cubicles. Two months ago, it began focusing the center on answering technical calls, leaving most billing questions to other locations.
People hired here spend six weeks in classroom training, and then 90 days taking calls in a supervised setting, raising their hands for assistance when they run into trouble.
One thing they must get accustomed to is the wealth of technology at their fingertips. Cingular is refining new databases of information that provide call center workers with instant insights into how profitable customers are, how likely they are to leave and how often they have called and why.
When a representative answers the phone, an information page pops up that includes the caller's name and number, whether he or she has called in the last five days, and why that call was made. In the top right of the screen are two icons — one indicating whether the caller is a threat to quit service (largely a measure of whether the customer is still under contract), and the other showing how much money the caller spends each month (a measure of the customer's value).
Before long, the screen indicates if the customer is profitable. If a customer is not very profitable, the company may be less likely to make concessions.
One new way Cingular is trying to mollify dissatisfied consumers is by giving call center workers more flexibility to give out credits — for instance, if there was an unexpected charge for use of text messages that perhaps was accrued by a subscriber's teenager.
In the left-hand corner of the service representative's computer screen is an icon of a traffic light that indicates if the wireless network is operating well (green), or has some problems (yellow or red). There is also a timer that tells the representatives how long the call is taking — the goal is to average less than 500 seconds a call, or about eight minutes.
The databases also instruct representatives how to address hundreds of billing and technical questions for a hundred different phones and multifunction devices.
To gauge the success of its new efforts, Cingular has deployed an automated questionnaire that gives a third of callers a chance to rate their customer service experience.
Meantime, the company is using the information it amasses to do broader calculations about what is bothering customers. For instance, Cingular tracks complaints against the store where customers bought their phone, so it can know, for example, if one store is not doing a good job explaining a particular feature.
"We can tell you which Radio Shack is driving the most calls, down to the store level," said Jack Wright, regional vice president for the call center in Austin, which serves callers from Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri and Kansas.
As the carriers try to improve, they are being mindful of the balance they must strike between conflicting goals: listening to and satisfying customers, while making the calls as short as possible.
The crucial factor in retaining customers, they say, is resolving their concerns on the first call, even if it takes a little more time to do so. Each time customers have to call back to get the same issue resolved, they are considerably less likely to renew a contract, said Marquett Smith, vice president for customer service at Verizon Wireless. "They're more loyal if they have to call in only one time," he said.
By this measure, though, the quality of the wireless industry's customer service has been heading in the wrong direction. According to J. D. Power & Associates, wireless customers are having to call more times to get a problem solved — an average of 1.83 calls in 2005, barely down from 1.84 in 2004 but up sharply from 1.75 in 2003. (Over all, 54 percent of wireless customers called a service center in 2005, the same as 2004 and up from 53 percent the year earlier).
The carriers assert that the time it takes to resolve calls reflects the complexities of the new gadgets.
At Verizon, which has had relatively high customer service marks, Mr. Smith said the company had devoted three call centers, including one opened Feb. 5 in Albuquerque, to answering questions about e-mail and other data services.
He said the company, which has 23 call centers, with some also doing data work, is in the process of moving all customer service operations in-house to more quickly disseminate information about new technology and business practices.
Soon, Verizon will also deploy a phone-based questionnaire to give users more opportunity to rate the customer service experience.
Verizon had been the biggest carrier until Cingular acquired AT&T Wireless last year. But the acquisition has created its own steep challenges for Cingular, which is still in the process of fusing the companies' billing and technology systems.
"In the old days, if the phone rang, they were good to go," said Laquenda Arberry, who has spent seven years taking calls at the Austin center, which before the merger was operated by AT&T Wireless. Now, "there are ring tones, graphics, more systems to check," she added. "You have to have a wider knowledge base."
The company is putting a new emphasis on hiring and retaining representatives who, to put it simply, are nice. As Ms. Arberry sits in her station amid a row of cubicles, taking an endless stream of calls, sometimes from deeply frustrated customers, she says the essential factor to success is not necessarily new technology, but old-fashioned listening skills.
Ms. Arberry is on a call with a woman who says she had a defective phone from Cingular, got a new one, and needs a shipping label to return the defective one.
Ms. Arberry spends almost eight minutes on the phone with the woman to understand her issue and to help her track down a label. Ms. Arberry ends up having to transfer her to a different department, where the hold time will be 10 minutes. The caller decides to call back later, but rather than being upset, the caller sounded grateful for the warning, Ms. Arberry says.
At least most of her callers have been leaving satisfied, she says.
"If they're upset, you just have to let them vent," she said. "I haven't had an earful in a while."
[Suppressed Sound Link]
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/business/yourmoney/05frenzy.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/business/yourmoney/05frenzy.html
By RICHARD SIKLOS NY Times Published: March 5, 2006
IN some ways, wireless is the new China. Both are huge, largely untapped markets for news and entertainment media companies. And media executives have made a lot of dreamy statements about both of these markets and funneled a lot of effort into them. Yet neither has yet translated into a significant new businesses for established companies, which are feverishly seeking ways to grow in a world of technological and competitive obstacles.
Lloyd Miller
While China's media moment seems eternally right around the corner, mobile may be approaching its own at last — it may just take a lot longer and be less earth-shaking than the recent hoopla may suggest. Last week, there were announcements of three ventures by media companies looking to insinuate themselves into the hip pockets of teenagers and their elders. All three are part of a deluge of wireless moves and offer glimpses at new ways of both distributing existing products and using big-media power to start new businesses.
In one of the deals unveiled last week, the MTV Networks unit of Viacom said it would sell mobile versions of its MTV, VH1, CMT and Comedy Central channels to Sprint customers; the services will include video clips from shows including "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart."
The most intriguing announcement came from a tentacle of the News Corporation, in the form of Mobizzo, which is essentially a kind of online studio and store for selling games, ring tones and adornments for mobile handsets.
CBS, meanwhile, which is perhaps best known for its notably unhip television network, plans to start a venture along the lines of Mobizzo in a few weeks. For now, CBS unveiled a plan to sell multimedia message alerts nationwide that will play short video clips on some cellphones. In a way, CBS aims to show that it wants to compete in this arena along with MTV, NBC and ESPN — rivals that have been making their content available across a range of new mobile formats and gizmos.
What is significant about the News Corporation and CBS announcements is that both companies plan to sell their new services directly to consumers. Instead of buying these services through a mobile phone carrier, users can go directly to Web sites or can send text messages to an address that will instantly sign them up for, say, a "Napoleon Dynamite" wallpaper that they can use to amuse themselves and their friends. In the case of CBS's new service, users can sign up to pay 99 cents a month for news alerts from CBS News, and $3.99 for alerts from the syndicated program "Entertainment Tonight."
For media companies, direct selling is just one advantage that mobile technologies have over other forms of distributing information and entertainment, including the Internet.
Another is that young consumers, in particular, have come to view their mobile phones as fashion accessories, giving rise to a whole new category of personal media products, such as ring tones and avatars, which are animated images of oneself that are sent to friends with messages. (If you have to ask what these are, you probably don't need one.)
A third advantage is that anything bought through a mobile phone — even if not purchased through your service provider itself — can be automatically added to your monthly phone statement, avoiding the bother of having to enter a credit card number.
Add them up and these features illustrate why mobile media could be a big deal: they turn consumption into both a fashion statement and an impulse purchase, while further letting the genie of what-I-want-when-I-want-it out of the bottle.
This has proved to be the case in other countries that have more advanced mobile networks. Much has been made, for instance, about how the United States' mobile market compares with markets in places like South Korea — where users enjoy all sorts of interactive features and pristine television signals on their handsets — and how wireless carriers here have invested some $10 billion to catch up quickly. It's only understandable that established media companies, as well as the Internet titans Google and Yahoo, want to try to capture everything from the growth of the ring tone and games markets to emerging forms of mobile advertising.
The nagging question about all the activity around mobile — the China factor, you might say — is whether the United States will embrace these new products the way other nations have.
As for the China analogy, think about this: A conventional view among American media executives is that if the Chinese government would only allow a truly progressive market for information and ideas (with attendant copyright protections), foreign media companies would flourish.
But that assumes that China has a latent entertainment consumption culture as powerful as the one that drives the United States economy, and that its citizens' tastes are very similar to those of Americans.
It is absurd that only 20 new Hollywood movies are allowed into China's theaters each year. Yet even if audiences there could legitimately go to a theater to watch "Brokeback Mountain," "Munich" and the other contenders for tonight's Academy Awards, they might not be as interested in doing so as both the censors in Beijing and the moguls in New York would like to think.
Similarly, it would be prudent to temper expectations about the prospects for wireless media in the United States — especially until it becomes clear how much people are willing to spend on these newfangled services and the fancy phones needed to use them.
CONSIDER a survey, released last week by the banking firm RBC Capital Markets, of nearly 1,000 people aged 21 to 65. When asked to respond "true" or "false" to the statement "There are many new and cool wireless products coming on the market that I am eager to purchase," 71 percent said "false." And when asked to respond to "I am not interested in watching TV programs or movies on my handheld device," 76 percent said "true."
Of course, even if this view of consumer desires proves accurate in the short term, there is plenty of business to be done selling new and cool wireless products for 20-odd percent of the 200 million cellphones currently in use nationwide.
And surveys about nascent products don't always tell the whole story. Most people probably didn't sit around thinking that they wanted to watch video clips on their computers or send instant messages to one another until these services hit critical mass.
For now, though, it seems premature to set the buzz for wireless at anything but the low setting.
******************************************************************************************************************************
Suddenly, an Industry Is All Ears
By MATT RICHTEL AUSTIN, Tex., March 3 —
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/04/technology/04service.html
Michael Stravato for The New York Times
Brendan McGahan, 26, rips off his headset and darts from his cubicle looking for a supervisor. "I'm getting close to an escalation," he says over the drone of other cubicle dwellers.
Just out of the Air Force, Mr. McGahan recently landed a job that entails keeping frustrated Cingular Wireless customers from losing it. He is a trainee in the customer service center here, and he has a live one on the line: the caller complains he cannot hear well on his mobile phone and is demanding a free replacement.
Help arrives seconds later from a hovering supervisor, who studies the customer's account on a computer screen and advises Mr. McGahan to offer a $50 rebate for a new phone and 500 extra minutes of talk time.
Across the wireless phone industry, there is a feeling of urgency. The big cellphone companies are eager to improve their customer support and service, an area that was an afterthought just a short time ago.
From computer makers to credit card issuers to airlines, customer service is a vital aspect of attracting and retaining business, but few industries do it as poorly as cellphone companies, says Jon Anton, director of the Center for Customer-Driven Quality at Purdue University. Their services are so bad that they "are inefficient at being ineffective," Mr. Anton said.
Their collective mediocrity is becoming more costly as customers leave each month by the hundreds of thousands. Now that most Americans own cellphones, growth for mobile carriers means not just finding new subscribers but holding onto existing ones. And yet, some 45 million customers, or about 20 percent of all subscribers, switch providers each year, according to the Yankee Group, a market research firm. And sometimes, as in the case of Denise Ferrari, they swear they will never go back.
Ms. Ferrari, 41, a saleswoman for a home security company in the San Francisco Bay Area, dropped Cingular in 2002 after having a problem first with dropped calls and then with customer service. She said she called numerous times in vain to get her deposit back.
"Burn me once, I'm gone," said Ms. Ferrari, who now gets service from Sprint Nextel.
Customers need little provocation to make an exit. "We're at the point where getting a phone isn't a big deal and transferring a number isn't a big deal," said Esteban Kolsky, a research director for Gartner, a market research firm. "Once the business is a commodity, as it has become, customer service is the differentiator."
That fact is not lost on Cingular, which tends to fall in the bottom half of independent customer service surveys. "It's no secret that the wireless industry doesn't have the world's greatest reputation for customer service," said Larry Carter, a senior vice president of Cingular.
"We're in a place we're not happy with," Mr. Carter said. But "there's been a very concerted effort on our part to change the way we interact with customers."
Cingular's mentoring program for recruits like Mr. McGahan is an example of the tactics the big players are trying. In general, carriers are being more liberal with credits, particularly for high-paying customers. They are also introducing customer feedback initiatives and moving call center operations in-house, rather than relying on outside contractors.
Still, wireless providers, which until recently focused largely on building networks and amassing customers, are playing catch-up in the customer service game, a challenge aggravated by the fast pace of technology change. Many cellphones now have music players and cameras, and can also be used to surf the Internet and send text and e-mail messages.
In the case of Cingular, its own efforts to improve are furthest along in the Austin call center, which employs 750 representatives who take calls until midnight from their gray cubicles. Two months ago, it began focusing the center on answering technical calls, leaving most billing questions to other locations.
People hired here spend six weeks in classroom training, and then 90 days taking calls in a supervised setting, raising their hands for assistance when they run into trouble.
One thing they must get accustomed to is the wealth of technology at their fingertips. Cingular is refining new databases of information that provide call center workers with instant insights into how profitable customers are, how likely they are to leave and how often they have called and why.
When a representative answers the phone, an information page pops up that includes the caller's name and number, whether he or she has called in the last five days, and why that call was made. In the top right of the screen are two icons — one indicating whether the caller is a threat to quit service (largely a measure of whether the customer is still under contract), and the other showing how much money the caller spends each month (a measure of the customer's value).
Before long, the screen indicates if the customer is profitable. If a customer is not very profitable, the company may be less likely to make concessions.
One new way Cingular is trying to mollify dissatisfied consumers is by giving call center workers more flexibility to give out credits — for instance, if there was an unexpected charge for use of text messages that perhaps was accrued by a subscriber's teenager.
In the left-hand corner of the service representative's computer screen is an icon of a traffic light that indicates if the wireless network is operating well (green), or has some problems (yellow or red). There is also a timer that tells the representatives how long the call is taking — the goal is to average less than 500 seconds a call, or about eight minutes.
The databases also instruct representatives how to address hundreds of billing and technical questions for a hundred different phones and multifunction devices.
To gauge the success of its new efforts, Cingular has deployed an automated questionnaire that gives a third of callers a chance to rate their customer service experience.
Meantime, the company is using the information it amasses to do broader calculations about what is bothering customers. For instance, Cingular tracks complaints against the store where customers bought their phone, so it can know, for example, if one store is not doing a good job explaining a particular feature.
"We can tell you which Radio Shack is driving the most calls, down to the store level," said Jack Wright, regional vice president for the call center in Austin, which serves callers from Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri and Kansas.
As the carriers try to improve, they are being mindful of the balance they must strike between conflicting goals: listening to and satisfying customers, while making the calls as short as possible.
The crucial factor in retaining customers, they say, is resolving their concerns on the first call, even if it takes a little more time to do so. Each time customers have to call back to get the same issue resolved, they are considerably less likely to renew a contract, said Marquett Smith, vice president for customer service at Verizon Wireless. "They're more loyal if they have to call in only one time," he said.
By this measure, though, the quality of the wireless industry's customer service has been heading in the wrong direction. According to J. D. Power & Associates, wireless customers are having to call more times to get a problem solved — an average of 1.83 calls in 2005, barely down from 1.84 in 2004 but up sharply from 1.75 in 2003. (Over all, 54 percent of wireless customers called a service center in 2005, the same as 2004 and up from 53 percent the year earlier).
The carriers assert that the time it takes to resolve calls reflects the complexities of the new gadgets.
At Verizon, which has had relatively high customer service marks, Mr. Smith said the company had devoted three call centers, including one opened Feb. 5 in Albuquerque, to answering questions about e-mail and other data services.
He said the company, which has 23 call centers, with some also doing data work, is in the process of moving all customer service operations in-house to more quickly disseminate information about new technology and business practices.
Soon, Verizon will also deploy a phone-based questionnaire to give users more opportunity to rate the customer service experience.
Verizon had been the biggest carrier until Cingular acquired AT&T Wireless last year. But the acquisition has created its own steep challenges for Cingular, which is still in the process of fusing the companies' billing and technology systems.
"In the old days, if the phone rang, they were good to go," said Laquenda Arberry, who has spent seven years taking calls at the Austin center, which before the merger was operated by AT&T Wireless. Now, "there are ring tones, graphics, more systems to check," she added. "You have to have a wider knowledge base."
The company is putting a new emphasis on hiring and retaining representatives who, to put it simply, are nice. As Ms. Arberry sits in her station amid a row of cubicles, taking an endless stream of calls, sometimes from deeply frustrated customers, she says the essential factor to success is not necessarily new technology, but old-fashioned listening skills.
Ms. Arberry is on a call with a woman who says she had a defective phone from Cingular, got a new one, and needs a shipping label to return the defective one.
Ms. Arberry spends almost eight minutes on the phone with the woman to understand her issue and to help her track down a label. Ms. Arberry ends up having to transfer her to a different department, where the hold time will be 10 minutes. The caller decides to call back later, but rather than being upset, the caller sounded grateful for the warning, Ms. Arberry says.
At least most of her callers have been leaving satisfied, she says.
"If they're upset, you just have to let them vent," she said. "I haven't had an earful in a while."
[Suppressed Sound Link]
