Though I doubt this will ever be a policy, every company needs something like this as long as it's used in the customer's best interest.

Because we've all gotten shafted by somebody who either doesn't know how or doesn't have any interest in doing their job properly.

Common practice from companies with superior Customer Service.

Unfortunately Sears is not know for superior Customer Service so I can understand why Delivery would be confused.

OH, and you are suppose to ID yourself at the beginning of the call. Duh.

Every single customer service phone number I've ever called says "we may monitor your call to ensure good service". That's exactly what they mean. A lot of times there is someone listening and you have no idea that they can hear everything you say while you're "on hold"

@RudeandRude: err... no. This isn't what that means. When they say it may be monitored they mean the call is recorded and Quality Assurance CAN listen in. The call may be reviewed at al ater point as well to make sure you're not deviating from the service expected.

However, a rep cold transferring a caller (doing a transfer without informing the next rep who they are, that they're listening, and what's happening) is never policy. It's a BAD thing to do because it creates confusion and requires additional explaining again and again.

@Corporate-Shill: Typically when done properly the rep will talk to the next rep to explain what's going on. Not just transfer and wait on to chime in later. That's really not good.

Ah yes, some of my favorite things I've heard customers say is while they were on hold by me. (I hear these during reviews with my supervisor, because I am busy when I have them on hold during realtime.)

My favorite one, I didn't know he was doing this at the time...and I was so glad I didn't at the time or else I would have been disturbed by his behavior. I had asked to place him on hold to contact my distribution office (Think of the guys who dispatch utility works as I work for a electric company.)
(Paraphrase) "Answer the other phone honey, I am in the bathtub right now!"

While he was on the phone with me... taking a bath. Class

Most business phone systems can conference, warm, or cold transfer.

Conference and warm transfers are similar - they both involve staying on the line. The type and configuration of the ACD determines which one of the two is preferred.

A cold transfer is just that -- transfer the call and drop it.

Although QA should have rules as to how warm/cold/conference calls are handled or introduced, the rules are not always followed.

Nothing terribly surprising here....

@Teradoc: Actually, it's even more fun if you put customers on mute - they only hear silence, but you can hear everything they say. The really fun stuff usually involves your intelligence or how much they hate the company you represent (or work for).

@Teradoc: I never talk while on hold unless I hit mute on my side. It always amazes me me when people call and lie to the other side, then when they are on hold start saying what really happened. I sometimes sing horribly with the music in hopes they do mute me on their side. :D

Sounds like Warranty scared the crap out of Delivery!

@HogwartsAlum: Yeah, Delivery actually read Warranty's terms.

Sounds like good customer service to me. Sears has always been good at following up with us, and we've bought many, many things from them over the years. They had a bad spell where customer service really suffered, but lately they have been pulling out the stops to get it back on track and I applaud them.

No matter if you are a CSR or a cubicle dweller, you should always EXPECT your phone calls, e-mails and everything else is being monitored and recorded. It's just the way business works nowadays and has for a while now.

I work for the IT helpdesk for my university as a supervisor and we commonly listen in on other people's calls...even if we didn't take the call at some point. If someone sounds like they are struggling with a caller I'll listen in because I anticipate questions and that will let me answer the questions better. I try not to randomly talk in the conversation because it usually scares the customer, not so much the support person on the phone :-p

I had an issue with a Sprint/NEXTEL store last year. I was trying to add a phone to my account for my wife that was supposed to be "free". However they didn't have that phone in stock and the clerk said it would be mailed to me. He then told me that I owed him $100 for the phone. It was supposed to be free, but this guy made up some rule that since it was now supposedly a "special order" I didn't get the promotional price. I told the guy to stick it and I cancelled.
Fast forward 3 months and NEXTEL starts billing me for a second phone line that I didn't own. I kpt getting the run around until I stumbled across an agent that knew what bewing a CSR was. She transfered me to anothr department for help - and unknown to me and the other party she remained on the line. This next agent started giving me a run around and she cut in and asked for his ID number and told him to quit jerking me around and take care of me. She then told me she was crediting me 3 months of service for the trouble.

Before the company I worked for switched to an automated recording system, the supervisors would rate our customer service skills by listening to us live. When I was a new hire, I had some sort of problem that I didn't know the answer to, and was having trouble finding it in the manual. My supervisor came up behind me and told me the answer, freaking me out a bit in the process.

The CS rep working Delivery freaked out over nothing new and should be retrained. This is standard for many companies and Warranty was really nice to actually warm-transfer the call.

@Corporate-Shill: That was the common, and expected, practice at the company I spent 25 years at.

The first person to take a customer's call in our engineering group STAYED with that customer until the customer's needs were taken care of.

In many ways we became the customer's internal spokesman and championed them to a solution.

Yes, it took some extra time for us, but it assured the customer that we didn't just dial some random number and dump them - and the folks on the third leg of that call didn't have the opportunity to just BS the customer to make them go away - we were there to prevent that.

(Usually it was a mis-directed call from a random customer that reached us in engineering, especially if it came to me, one of the engineering managers, but having been involved with setting that rule, I followed it, to.)

We actually helped our company's customers.

The phone rep was "riding the call" so she would not have to hang up and get another (potentially bad) call. Most reps would just sit and listen (with their mic on mute), but it's nice this rep actually used her laziness for good.

/former GeekSquad Mission control rep (unfortunately)

"This is not the White House. We don't need Secret Service."

Yes, you do. For one reason: If you aren't confident in your ability to provide excellent customer service, you need help. If you are confident in your ability to provide excellent customer service, you shouldn't care if someone from your own company listens in.

@Ratty: It depends on the company. I have worked in call centers where somone was actively listening in on calls. They also recorded calls, but there was certainly a live person listening in to random calls to make sure techs werent messing around.

You guys have it all wrong. "Delivery" was freaked out because it was the first time that a delivery from Sears was actually scheduled to make it on time to the customer!

Matt Burman:
Some of the guidence engineers were solid (coates and luis C) some of them were tools.

as a consumer, i have, on occasion, employed a similar trick. whenever i get caught in the loop where department A tells me to speak to department B, i'll get them both on the line & let them bicker over who dropped the ball.

i always find listening to the backpedaling rather enjoyable.

Sears, Kmart and Lands End have been train wrecks since Eddie Lambert bought them. Service is horrid, the stores are run down (and he has no plans to fix them) and prices are not good.

It is VERY odd the warranty employee would stay on the phone without delivery being aware this was a policy. Hoever, delivery was unprofessional and out of line beyond words to "freak out" and question the practice with a customer on the line.

If this was not normal procedure, you put the caller on hold and privately speak to a supervisor.

I had a similar thing with AT&T today. The tier one help center for U-Verse internet said she couldn't help me and was transferring me to tier 2. I'm used to the cold transfers, I can't even get the staff in my department to not do that.

Anyway, while listening to the hold music, I said to my co-worker (shared office), yay, they're "transfering" me to tier 2. The tier one person said that's right sir I am.

She didn't stay on the line, just long enough to give them my name, account info, and call back number. I had to re-explain my problem, but it was still a surprise.

Please avoid Sears at all costs. They will make your life miserable if they have the chance.

If anyone shows up(odds are they won't) they are going to tell you they are here to deliver and install the appliance. You will say, I don't have time for that, just drop it off. They will say they are not allowed to do that and leave.

The title and tone of the article are mis-representative of the facts. This is not a case of eavesdropping. This is a clear case of "warranty" transferring the call to "delivery" and failing to introduce the situation to "delivery" before passing the customer off to them. The customer was instead left to initiate the conversation with delivery after the call was transferred, while "warranty" remained unannounced on the line, leading "delivery" to assume that the customer had called in directly and had not been transferred.

There is no "new Sears eavesdropping system", as the author implies. This is a case of two Sears employees handling a daily inter-departmental relay situation very poorly, both in the way it was transferred and in the way it was handled post transfer.

OP/author should issue a clarification and not distort clearly see through customer service scenarios in the future for the sake of a sensationalist blog piece.

I worked in a great company for customer service. We had a philosophy of a single point of contact for all customers. We never transferred people - we had conference calls. If I had to speak to another department, I would conference them in, introduce the parties and mention that I would be on the line to answer any questions that arose. Sometimes that meant I sat through hours of technical support calls, sales calls, licensing calls, etc. But we were there for the customer.

I often remind people that when they are on "hold" there is a chance (however slim) that someone is actively listening in to what you are saying. For instance, a friend of mine was dealing with a warranty company, and the second he got put on hold he looked at me and said something along the lines of "I can't believe they have these *racially insensitive term for an Indian* answering the phones. I'd rather talk to someone that actually speaks English". Now, if someone was listening, you know his customer service experience would have gone from decent to absolutely horrendous. This is sort of like how you NEVER, EVER bad mouth a waiter or waitress in a restaraunt. If they don't spit in your food and/or drinks the day you badmouth them, they probably will the next time you come in (they do not forget, they do not forgive).

Use common sense when talking to people on the phone. The last thing you want is for a problem to arise, and for you launching into a verbal tirade while on "hold" to be presented when you are in arbitration.

@Tijil:

Yep, common practice at a lot of old companies, especially so with speciality companies and certain governement agencies.

I don't know who I would be able to trust more...someone name delivery or someone named warranty. I guess I would kinda feel hesitant/reluctant/uneasy after they let me down the first time

Is this appliance being paid for under a home warranty? If so, then "Warranty" probably had nothing to do with Sears other than writing the check for the appliance. It sounds like the customer called the home warranty company, who then directed her to Sears and remained on the line to ensure the homeowner was taken care of.

Good customer service on the part of the home warranty rep, but the only involvement with Sears involves a spooked CSR.

I work at an IT call center for a large oil company, and it is our policy that when we transfer someone to another department, we always warm transfer by putting the customer on hold, calling the other department, giving the person in the other department a brief description of the problem, and then conferencing the customer back in and introducing them to the person in the other department. Then we mute our own line but still listen in at least long enough to make sure the customer is going to be properly taken care of and not just bounced right back to us. I've never had to jump back in to the conversation yet, though.

Other than Delivery's reaction, I think this is a great way to execute customer service. Most complications are due to poor communication.

@JoshRogan: This is exactly what I was thinking. A home warranty company is an independently run company that covers lots of work on a home after purchasing one of their warranties, the fact that Sears was the supplier of this replacement item was not relevant. Something breaks - AC, stove, whatever. You call warranty company, they say "h, we need to get you a new stove from Sears because that's what you had. They call Sears, connect the two of you to arrange delivery, warranty rep stays on the line because they're footing the bill. Sears rep gets freaked out because it's not a Sears Employee and she has no clue where this other person came from.

As long as they note ' this call may be monitored ' at the begining if not there are some serious privacy issues beside being ignorant . Just like if somebody has you on speaker phone they should announce it .

It shows a lack of professionalism and awareness that the customers ARE aware and don't like these tactics .

... I don't have a problem with calls being monitored, or with two agents participating on a call, but it might have been a good idea for Sears to train their call-center agents so that they don't act like freaked out spazzes when it actually happens. You want the customer to believe you actually know what you're doing, after all...

@BPA-Free_GitEmSteveDave: And I thought I was the only one who has little

sing-a-longs whilst on hold!

Eavesdropping on *every* phone call is one of very few ways to ensure great customer service.

It reminds people to be nicer to you - and if they can't be, they get canned. And it also makes them less likely to sit there and take your abuse if you're a bad customer who yells - because then they know someone's got their back (and it won't be just an x-said/y-said case.)

Also, think how many jobs it would add to the economy. Heh.

@RudeandRude: They do say that, but they're referring to either one of two things:

1.) A special department (usually a Quality Assurance dept) will listen live to the call to assure it is handled properly, or

2.) The call will be recorded and listened to by a Quality Assurance rep at a later time for review.

However, neither of these imply said person jumping in in the middle of the call; they don't do it, as it's not their job.

This was something altogether different. Good different, though. Perhaps the person from Warranty should have gone to greater lengths to ease the person in Delivery, but it was cool of them to stay on and make sure the situation got taken care of.

@Winterfall007: I had an issue with my iPhone not being able to send or receive text messages, so I called Applecare. They told me it was an AT&T issue, and to hold for a minute. When Applecare came back he had someone from ATT on the line and explained my problem to him, made sure he didn't miss anything, and ATT fixed the problem right there.

It's a really nice way to make sure your customer gets handled properly.

It does seem odd that the Delivery person wouldn't be told that Warranty was staying on the line, though. And just sitting there in silence is kinda creepy.

@Teradoc: The worst thing I had for that was a guy who decided to call me while he was jogging. So I have this high-tech headset on that gives very good audio, and I get to listen to all the splendor of a middle age man jogging, thumping, and panting while trying to order an insurance policy.

Wonderful, classy times.

@Ratty: Every time I've had to call ANY credit card company I've been cold transferred all over the place. It's fun having to give out your information 6 times in one call.

@KCChiefsFan: Pretty sure that if you're 10 hours into a 12 hour shift, the last thing you're doing is studying the face of the low-tipping customers, so you can get your revenge. All that's on your mind is getting home and a) falling asleep in your clothes or b) falling asleep in the tub.

I work in tech support, and sometimes when I transfer a customer to billing I will stay on the line in case the customer has another question. However, when I do so, I both explain that I'm doing so to the customer, and to the agent at the other end. And then if I want to leave the line, I will say "I'm going to drop off the call now, if you don't need anything else."

What's weird about that Sears call is that Warranty just freakily stayed on the line without informing anyone.

We used to do this with IBM all the time. The customer really appreciates it, but I agree, it is nice to KNOW that someone else is there, but once you work in that environment, you get used to "knowing" someone is probably on the line with you pretty quickly.

Was Jason warned that he would participate in a conference call?

I mean, not even the other Sears worker knew there was another worker listening/talking.

When I worked at Wells Fargo I used to do this all the time, though it was highly against the rules. A homeowner would call in, I would have to transfer them to Loss Mit (who perpetually does a horrible job), but instead of a finalized transfer I would stay on the line. Most of the time I would never say anything, I would just note the account as they were talking so the loss mit person could read it if they didn't know what they were talking about. I'm glad I monitored those. There were a lot of things homeowners would say that made no sense at all to me, and after listening to those I knew where they were coming from. It was a case of one hand not talking to the other.

If I got caught it could have been kaput for me. A lot of the reps on my floor would do this so they wouldn't have to take another call. Transfer, conference (how to do it on our phones), mute, and talk to your friends. I know this isn't the case here, but it happens far more than people think. People would also do that with calls they just received. The call comes in, just conference it back into the queue. It can help your handle time, and you don't have to take the call. Just stay muted on the line while another rep takes it. If you ever call Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, and it rings like you're going to a person, then goes to another number or back to the beginning menu, that's what just happened. Chances are the rep is still on the line.

Disclaimer: this is what happened at my call center when I worked there. I don't work there anymore, but my roommate still does. He said things haven't changed much.