Before I castigate a company or group of companies for a particularly irritating bit of behavior, I try to put myself in the company's shoes. I realize how difficult it can be to run a contact center. My first job was in a pizza restaurant, where I was often working the phones in-between other duties. And I'm sure I remarked more than once aloud, and far more often to myself, that the business of making and serving pizza would go much more smoothly if it weren't for all the customers constantly getting in the way.
The world has become much more complex with the growing demand for always-on customer service and the heightened expectations that come with the Internet: on-demand order status, knowledge bases, and the like. I appreciate all this. But none of the above excuses the distressing behavior that has been brewing since the late 1990s—hiding important contact channels from customers, through a variety of sneaky and ultimately self-defeating methods including unpublished and unadvertised phone numbers as well as delaying or outright denying a live audience for customers who do manage to dial in.
I can only conclude that when some companies discovered how easy it was for customers to stumble on their phone number online, no longer restricted to finding a warranty card or using a directory service, they got nervous and pulled their phone numbers from any easily visible spot they could think of—including their own websites. This is such a stunning turnaround considering that 10 years ago, most companies would have fought tooth and nail to get their customers to memorize their phone numbers. A scant handful of companies can claim that sort of reach on the national level even today, along with a few catchy numbers in every metropolitan market (Ask 10 Chicagoans to call Empire Carpet. Most should be able to do so even if they have dirt floors.)
But despite ever-plummeting telecom costs and the obvious advantage of customers picking up the phone to call, some couldn't take the heat and scrambled to take phone numbers off of everywhere and anywhere of consequence. This is a tremendous waste of everybody's time. It makes the customer's time-to-resolution longer—no matter how the contact center scores itself, the true beginning of a "support incident" is not when the customer deigns to let you know about it, but when he decides he has a problem in the first place. It also can't keep customers from ringing your phones—but it certainly can decrease the odds that they will call the right people. A hardy soul who has been down this road once or twice doubtless knows that any public company will have a phone number of record, easily obtained from a corporate profile page on a stock quoting site. Or that most Internet domain name registrations have a phone number on record for technical and administrative contacts. Either search can turn up a company phone number in seconds—and enough people know how to do it to start ringing corporate headquarters and making a mess. (And if they didn't know before, they know now.)
These are the kinds of people who are going to start calling the chairman's secretary and wasting a lot of valuable time, and probably creating a great deal of embarrassment for the customer contact organization when people very high up in the food chain start asking why they're being pestered with simple, straightforward problems.
Just as evasive is the growing number of companies disabling the traditional "dial 0 for assistance" feature on their IVRs. Some simply refuse to offer live support to their customers, or to a certain tier of customer dialing in without the "gold status" phone number. There can be valid reasons for discouraging the use of live agents. There are certainly some tasks which can be handled more cheaply (in the company's interest) as well as more quickly and/or more effective (in the client's interest) through automation, such as the IVR system or a website.
Intercepting one "dial 0" request to inform a customer of additional time-saving options can, in fact, be a great boon to all concerned. But at some point, customers must be given credit for not only knowing their own needs, but perhaps for understanding your system better than you do. If I know full well that the website will not allow me to schedule a pickup for a ground package using a third-party account number, then I most certainly need to speak to an agent—and no amount of praise for the benefits of the shipping website will change that fact. Brushing off customers is always done at your peril—because, again, it is the customer, not the company, who declares when a problem begins and ends.
The very best customer relationship strategists remark that every single customer encounter is an opportunity to do something extraordinary for that customer. Pulling down the shades and pretending that nobody's home is not what they had in mind.