Just got off the phone with the US Passport office or some subcontractor of theirs; I *really* needed to expedite a passport renewal I had previously sent in. On one hand this isn’t rocket surgery. On the other hand, I think this is the most optimized phone process I have ever seen. Almost makes one have faith in the government again.
- Automated phone tree only required 3 selections, one of which was “press 1 for English”. The other two selections had zero ambiguity.
- Reasonable wait time, and a good conservative prediction of wait time. “3-5 minutes” was estimate, took just a hair over 3 minutes.
- A single good intermediate update “less than 2 minutes”. Hold music (nice classical piece) that made it clear I had not disconnected, but let me focus on another easy task while waiting.
- The support person didn’t actually sound all that educated, but spoke quite clear English, with an accent that I think would be easily understood anywhere in the country.
- I never had to repeat anything, and the person knew exactly what to do every step of the way.
- The person warned me she was going to repeat my credit card number back to me, so there was no awkward collision of voices as I start to read the next set of numbers as she repeats the first set back to me.
- At the end, the person gave me some good guidance re: checking back to make sure everything was going according to plan.
- For extra credit, she sneaked in some pertinent small talk (asking about rain in the city where I live), with timing such that there was zero increase in the length of the call.
Man, that should be a benchmark for how to handle customer calls. Way to go passport office.
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Originally Posted by Hambo
