MBNA call center agent training - what not to do

I can't say I'm real fond of MBNA either. They pulled a very similar scam to what you described on me. Their World Points things blow pretty bad too.

Qwest also tries that tact as well. I'm sure a lot of other companies do too. Why can't these companies leave me alone?

Chase isn't any better. My mom missed one payment, and they immediately raised the rate on her account to 17% from a 3.99% fixed for the life of the balance. These credit card people make too much money.

I am not fond of MBNA either. It really distrubes me when people call my cell phone to sell me some thing.

Great idea about doing the transfer thing.

The term she was using was "cross sells", not "call sales". It was just difficult to pick up through the recording and her nice southern accent.

I think you might be jumping the gun a bit to take your business elsewhere - cross-selling is a widespread and common practice, and quite frankly is all that companies like MBNA and others have left since the DNC rulings. I support the DNC lists, don't get me wrong, but I think you need to step back and realize that at MBNA, or Chase, or Citi, or any other large bank such as these, you are one of literally millions, or at least hundreds of thousands of customers. You can only expect so much of a "personal touch".

No, I don't work for any of those companies (though I did once...for MBNA!), but try to keep in mind that this is capitalism, folks.

Ahhh. "cross sales" makes more sense.

I'm quite familiar with cross sales. I write for Csutomer Interaction Solutions, a magazine dedicated to the call center arena.

My main problem with the call was her lack of attention (recording an errant message on my voicemail), but more importantly she called my WORK phone number. Don't sell me at work. If you want to sell me, sell me at home. My employer doesn't pay me to take personal calls from credit card companies.

Good points indeed. I work for a consulting company now, and my group is actually called "Customer Interactive Solutions", and I've unfortunately seen in the contact center space that too many agents don't really understand how to use the phone systems they rely on every day!! It is probably good for them to hear things like this to make sure it doesn't happen to them!

And I sympathize with you on being called at work. There is nothing I hate worse than picking up my *work* line (I work at home) and hearing the tell-tale intro script of a telemarketer...!!

MBNA has been merged with Bank of America. That's 48 million accounts to attend to without hiring the personel needed to handle that amount of accounts. Of course that means money will be lost but even more will be gained by mistakes account managers will make with such a huge call volume and limited time on the phone. Bank of America's customer satisfaction account manager have to meet a monthly goal of 2:14 time on the phone with their customer's resolving problems such as misposted payments, late fees, balance transfers, credit balance refunds, and many of them are required to handle multiple accounts in a single call. It's what it is.

I worked for MBNA for 3 years in the customer service dept. The account managers have to put up with non stop abuse from customers calling in. It is one of the most stressful jobs you could ever have.

Is it really that surprising that a bank would want to thank its customers for their previous business? Where's the alarming audio, exactly? Call centre employees are by definition of limited intelligence, although I'm sure very nice people - so why wouldn't they have a script?

The problem always arises from the agents generally not owning the process, products and even the task at hand. This is an opportunity to further commit the customer to your services, if this point is missed, just be satisfied with what you've got at the moment. An inappropriate 'upsell' might irritate the customer and even maybe loose you a customer altogether.