How to Deal With Challenging Vendors

For example, one cataloger’s phone company scrambled the lines so that about 20 percent of inbound callers got a phone company-generated message that the 800 number had been disconnected. These calls never showed up in phone center reports since they never reached the phone center.

Print a simple report showing the on-hold times that you measure on your test calls, and send the report to your call-center manager. Even incompetent call-center reps tend to grease the squeaky wheels first. And if your call-center staffers truly are incompetent, they may not know they have a problem—until you tell them.