27 May 2005
So this is why
A while ago I railed about an irritating fashion in user service scripting. It included:
All this reminds me of a bloke I new a while ago who was running a business. He said once that he had difficulty training his staff to say, “this is Chris” on the phone instead of “Chris speaking.” He had been to a seminar or course on customer service and believed that use of the this is script clearly demonstrated to his customers that his company was more up-to-date.
I finally found out why yesterday the this is script is favoured: when you answer the phone, the person at the other end is more likely to recall the last word you said than the penultimate one. So, if I answer with “Michael speaking” the other person is less likely to get my name than if I say “this is Michael.”
I guess this makes sense but I am concerned by an implied assumption about the attention span of people who use the phone.
