Inside the 1-800 factory
The topic of the moment, at least for the woman calling from Minnesota, is baby poop. Specifically, her daughter’s, which has turned green after a change of baby formulas. The mom has reached an unadorned office in Salt Lake City devoted to taking phone calls about baby formula. A college girl wearing a headset reassures the woman the color change is common when switching formulas, and only temporary.
Not far away, in a dim room nicknamed “The Jungle,’ calls come in from the nation’s gardeners, baffled by yellowing gardenia bushes, or irritated that the rose food has yet to trigger a bouquet, or nervous about how soon to let the dogs back in the yard after laying down a mist of weed killer.
Across a parking lot, in a long, sunny room with 10 dozen computer workstations, the air is filled with voices explaining America’s health-care system: “That’s right, you are responsible just for the $5 co-pay on your first visit to the gynecologist.’ “Ma’am, ma’am . . . Ma’am! Let me finish. Give me a chance to explain before you ask your next question.’
These offices shelter a bemusing collection of expertise--about fax modems, garden shears, hair color that comes in a bottle. There is a group that answers questions on nothing but how to play Sony’s on-line versions of “Jeopardy’ and “Wheel of Fortune.’ A group that handles calls on electric bills and power outages for customers of a utility two time zones away, in South Carolina. A spirited group that takes calls about toy cars and toy dolls; its office has toys propped everywhere.
These people--15,000 in all--constitute a kind of stealth society of advice. Although callers think they are reaching their health insurance provider or credit card company--and although the person on the other end of the line has access to your cell phone records or pay-per-view preferences--the people answering these phones work for a single company, Matrixx Marketing.
If any company can be said to answer the phone when America calls, it is Matrixx. Matrixx takes more than half a million calls a day, all on behalf of other companies. Even if you’ve never heard of Matrixx, you’ve almost certainly talked to its operators. If you’ve called Hitachi (1-800-HITACHI) looking for help running your laptop, you’ve talked to Matrixx, which staffs an information line and a technical help desk for Hitachi customers. If your HMO is U.S. Healthcare, you may have talked to a Matrixx employee about your co-payments. Matrixx answers all the phones for DirecTV--the number 1-800-DIRECTV goes straight to one of three Matrixx facilities. Matrixx answers some phones for Microsoft, for two of the nation’s big three long-distance carriers, for makers of blenders, CD-ROMs and infomercials. Of the top 100 companies on this year’s Fortune 500, 33 are Matrixx clients. If you’re curious to know how Gatorade achieves its distinctly fluorescing drinks, well, Matrixx answers the Gatorade help-line, whose number, just like with the baby formula, is stamped right on the container (1-800-88-GATOR).
This is the “tele-service’ business, the flip side of the telemarketing world--people who answer when we call. Tele-service is a huge, hidden universe, employing perhaps 2 million people. U.S. companies spend roughly $60 billion answering the phone each year, and the business is growing phenomenally. Most companies still handle their own calls--from the classified ad agents at the local newspaper to the clothing clerks at Land’s End. But the fastest growing part of tele-service involves outfits like Matrixx that answer the phone for other companies. The number of companies in the call-answering business has doubled in the past five years to roughly 1,200. The best of these impersonate their client companies--handling orders, complaints, credit card numbers and records--without callers ever realizing they aren’t talking to the company itself. (If you ask, the customer service reps on the phone are often instructed to lie and insist they are.)
Matrixx claims to have the highest revenues in the business, along with some of the most advanced technology. The company has 23 facilities in the United States and Europe. In 1996 alone it grew from 9,000 employees to 15,000, adding 100 employees a week. With revenue of $367 million last year, Matrixx provides almost a quarter of the profits for its parent, Cincinnati Bell.
A “call center,’ where companies like Matrixx make and take calls, is a fascinating blend of sweatshop and reference library, where anonymity affords callers a certain intimacy and where relentless intimacy becomes a form of numbing anonymity. It is a place of mystery, misdirection, charm and a little pathos. The call center world can be secretive, even paranoid. You think a call has been completed, but it hasn’t. You think you’ve reached the party to whom you are speaking, but you haven’t. They ask for your phone number, but they already know it. Matrixx’s call centers look like most modern office settings--a maze of identical cubicles, most not wide enough to extend your arms, each equipped with a computer and a phone. But what plays out over the phones is a strange, richly American tapestry: people talking about their breast cancer or about why their doll’s arm came off. Both kinds of callers have taken a leap of faith: They believe the stranger who answers the toll-free line will actually be able to help them.
*
Very little gets by Judie Blankshan, who takes calls for the baby formula company (which didn’t want to be identified for this story). She’s talking to Cathy, a mom from Simi Valley. Cathy has called to get her regular allotment of 50-cents-off coupons for the formula her son, Alex, drinks. As Blankshan calls up Cathy’s records from previous calls, Cathy chats merrily away. “I really love the formula,’ she says. “Do you have a line of baby foods?’ “We do have a cereal,’ says Blankshan, as she types. “It’s not out yet, it’s being test-marketed. It’s going to be very delicious; I’ve even tasted it.’
“You know,’ says Cathy, “I thought my baby was [developing] an allergy to the formula.’ Blankshan stops typing and looks up, alert. “He was having a wet cough. But I think he’s just sick.’
There is no change in Blankshan’s tone, but she points the conversation in a new direction. “How old is your baby?’ she asks. “Four-and-a-half months,’ Cathy answers. “I breast-fed three months, then started him on the formula. He got sick last week, and he still has the cough. My daughter had an allergy to the formula, but it doesn’t look like that’s what this is. The doctor says he’s just sick.’
Blankshan nods, her instincts working. Formula and a sick baby is usually nothing but a sick baby on formula. But sometimes the formula is making the baby sick. “What’s the number on the can of formula you are using now? And the expiration date?’ she asks. Cathy returns with the can and reads off the 12-digit lot number on the bottom and the expiration date. “OK, I’ll send you the coupons,’ says Blankshan, “and we’ll have someone call you in a couple days to make sure the baby is getting better.’
After Cathy hangs up, Blankshan dispatches the coupons, then fills out a special screen noting Alex’s “wet cough’ and illness, his sister’s baby formula allergy, the batch number of Cathy’s can of formula, encoding the record so that it will pop up in a couple days to remind another phone rep to call Cathy back to make sure Alex is getting better.
So a routine call to an 800 number to ask for some coupons--a call that could have been handled by an automated system--turns into something more. Probably Alex just has a cold. Maybe he can’t tolerate lactose. Maybe the batch of baby formula is bad. In any case, the baby formula company learned a lot--an early flag to a problem for a customer, perhaps for the company. It also learned that Cathy is so dedicated a customer that although her last baby was allergic to the formula, she was willing to try again. The brief call did three more things. When Cathy gets a call back from the baby formula company asking how Alex is feeling, mom will feel good about the people who make her baby’s food. (Heck, most pediatricians don’t call back to find out if the baby is better.) Cathy will be watching for the debut of the company’s cereal. And finally, the baby formula company learned that in Judie Blankshan, it has an attentive customer service representative.
Except, of course, Blankshan doesn’t work for the baby formula company. She works for Matrixx.
Matrixx’s baby formula call center is small--the DirecTV group takes more calls in a day than the baby formula group takes in a month. But it’s an example of the science and sleight-of-hand involved in caring for someone else’s customers. Matrixx’s baby formula center is staffed by 20 women (they had a man, once), available 12 hours a day, Monday through Friday. A framed picture of the baby formula maker’s corporate headquarters in California hangs in their office, and the company has requested that reps tell callers who ask that they are in California, so parents won’t think the company isn’t taking their calls itself.
For a group that answers the phone for a living--normally a high-turnover job--the women are unusually stable and devoted. Their average tenure is four years.
The reps wear ID badges that include the logo of the baby formula company and, for simplicity, many tell acquaintances they work for the baby formula company, not Matrixx. Most of them have tasted the formula, so when worried parents call and ask if that’s how it should taste, they can reassure them: It’s supposed to taste yucky. If any of the women should have a baby of her own, her first year’s formula is free. The baby formula company is so happy with the Matrixx reps that it routinely takes several of them to baby trade shows to talk up the formula, and the reps sit down every few weeks with baby formula executives to discuss what the parents are saying. The call center is considered so important a connection to customers that both the baby formula’s ad agency and its laboratory are tapped into Matrixx’s computers so they can get real-time access to the information the reps gather.
A couple years ago, the women became so concerned that no advice was offered after hours or over the weekend--the 800 number played a recording that offered a second 800 number in case of emergency--they asked to be put on beepers. Now, 24 hours a day, the nation’s parents are never more than a toll-free call away from the reassurance of Blankshan and her colleagues.
*
It’s just before 7 p.m., mountain time, on the day Dennis Rodman is rejoining the Chicago Bulls for a game against the Charlotte Hornets. In Matrixx’s DirecTV call center west of the Salt Lake City airport, this is prime time: Every chair is filled and dozens of TVs slung from the ceiling are in use as agents with remote controls flash through 175 channels, trying to help frustrated couch potatoes get their evening entertainment. Agents on a call have a vacant look in their eyes, listening, envisioning the problem. DirecTV’s satellite service offers 60 cable channels, 55 pay-per-view channels and dozens of regional sports channels. The agents are young--some are high school students--and they are well dressed, because Matrixx requires shirts and ties for men and nice blouses or dresses for women. (“And you have to wear underwear,’ says one agent.)
This is sweet, grease-free employment: getting paid $6 to $7 per hour to do nothing but talk on the phone about TV. There are 520 DirecTV cubicles in this one center, divided between two floors. The facility is staffed around the clock because “people call us when they are watching TV’--including the middle of the night, says Renee Kuwahara, the Matrixx vice president responsible for the DirecTV operation.
Kuwahara, who came from Fidelity Investments, presides over a remarkable example of corporate outsourcing. When DirecTV started service in June 1994, Matrixx had 25 agents handling calls about DirecTV. Now it deploys 2,500-- more than double the number of people DirecTV itself employs. “When we turned the service on,’ says Kuwahara, “we had people who cried. Rural folks who had never seen TV before, suddenly they have 100 channels.’ Others inexplicably bonded with the Matrixx agents. Near dawn on an overnight shift, Mark Jarvis, a 30-year-old rep in the DirecTV group, took a call “from a guy named Nicolas. He’d been up all night watching TV, you could tell, he sounded kind of blurry. I like to imagine people’s faces when I talk to them on the phone, and he’s a big guy, I think. He has a big-guy voice. And he says, ‘I haven’t gotten my NBA welcome kit yet.’ He’s signed up for the package of NBA games [on DirecTV], but he hasn’t gotten his welcome kit. He says, ‘I go out with my friends, they’ve all got their NBA jackets, I don’t have mine. I’ve got my DirecTV hat on now. But I want my NBA jacket.’ So I sent it out. Now he calls me up about once a week just to talk.’
On this evening, 18-year-old Calvin Wilkerson sits in his cubicle talking to Andrew in West Frankfort, Ill., a Chicago suburb. Andrew can’t find the Bulls-Hornets game on his TV. Wilkerson quietly talks to the man as he fires through channels, looking for the game. There it is on one channel, but Wilkerson knows that broadcast is blacked out in Chicago. “Sir,’ he says, “I can’t find that game on any other
channel. But let me at least see if I can find out why it’s blacked out.’
He puts Andrew on hold and starts flashing through schedules and blackout restrictions. He makes a quick in-house call to someone he thinks might know. No luck. Finally, having been on the phone with Andrew for nine minutes and 50 seconds, Wilkerson discovers that the Bulls game is being broadcast on a Chicago-area TV station. “It’s shown over the air,’ Wilkerson tells the man. “That’s the reason it’s blacked out. You may want to check your local listings for a channel in your area showing it’--the old-fashioned way, through rabbit ears.
If the customer can’t always get what he wants despite 55 pay-per-view movie channels, at least he can get an explanation, or a little sympathy. Just yesterday, says agent Lisa Lachance, 18, a glitch prevented viewers from seeing part of the finals of the Westminster Dog Show. “My friend Irene got a call from a lady. She said she was going to blow up her satellite dish because she couldn’t see the dogs.’ Lachance pauses extravagantly. “Irene is like, ‘Well, ma’am, it’s your equipment.’ ‘
*
Matrixx is riding a wave of toll-free phone calling that is approaching mania in the United States. You can find a toll-free number on everything from a jar of pickles to the insert in AIDS medicine. The very business of using the phone this way owes its life to the 800 number. Americans dialed toll-free numbers 27.6 billion times last year--more than 75 million calls a day. All that dialing is fed by a convergence of trends: the increasing complexity of the products we buy, our insistence on immediate help with those products, our own restless mobility, which makes us unlikely to turn to a neighbor or a neighborhood merchant for advice and, above all, our comfort with the telephone.
The toll-free number is such an institution it’s hard to believe that toll-free calling has been available only since 1967, and that modern toll-free service has been in place since 1980. Roy Weber, the man whose name is on the patent for modern 800 dialing, is a dry-witted 51-year-old computer scientist for AT&T.; Of the explosion in toll-free calls--the number has almost tripled in the last five years--Weber says: “The patent has my name on it, but AT&T; owns it. Otherwise, Bill Gates would be the second-richest person in America.’
Weber remembers that in the late 1960s, some people at AT&T; opposed toll-free calling. “The logic was, who in the world would accept charges for a call when they didn’t know who was calling?’ Now, 40% of the calls made on AT&T;’s network each day are toll free. Strategic Telemedia, a New York consulting firm, predicts that this year AT&T; alone will carry 21 billion toll-free calls, double the volume for the whole country in 1992.
There was 800-style service before Roy Weber’s innovation. It was invented in 1967 and called “in-bound WATS.’ “The number of collect calls was going up,’ Weber says. “and the amount of time an operator spends on a collect call is high. They were expensive.’ So, in essence, 800 service was a way of automating the collect call. “Who did that is apparently lost to history,’ says Weber. “But it was very clever, because it was an era when all the switching machines were electromechanical--very inflexible, very limited.’ The technology made early toll-free service clumsy. There were no national toll-free numbers, so early users, like Amtrak and the airlines, had to have dozens around the country.
When Weber started working on the technology in 1978, only about 5% of calls were toll free. Weber’s task was to apply evolving digital technology to toll-free calling. His inspiration is elegant and simple: An 800 number isn’t a phone number at all--it’s actually the name of a computer file. When you dial an 800 or an 888 number, the phone network consults a computer file for instructions on what to do with the call. For customers like the Los Angeles Times (1-800-LATIMES), the file simply instructs the network to dial a specific telephone number in Los Angeles (213-237-5000) 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
For more demanding customers, the file the 800 number taps is filled with elaborate instructions. Customers calling 1-800-DIRECTV, for instance, are routed to one of three cities (Cincinnati, Salt Lake City or Ogden, Utah) depending on complicated formulas involving the time the call is made, where the call is coming from, volume on the network, how busy and how well-staffed each call center is. The phone network computer works its way through the digital instructions (“if after midnight, from east of the Mississippi River, on a weekday, and the 400th call in the last seven minutes, go there’), and ultimately is instructed to dial a specific phone number, which rings in the appropriate call center. Looking up the file, reading the instructions and completing the call takes milliseconds--and if you think about the number of times you dial toll-free numbers, the system is virtually flawless.
Weber’s innovation, patented in 1976 and put into service in 1980, ushered in an era of seamless routing of toll-free calls. It makes possible national toll-free numbers, smooth distribution of calls, even the personal, portable toll-free number (you just reprogram the database for the phone number where you want your toll-free calls sent--the callers never know). Matrixx’s phone service is so elaborate--it controls 40,000 toll-free numbers, more than any company that is not a phone service provider--that the company receives 1,500 phone bills a month, delivered on CD-ROM.
Toll-free calls, by the way, have always carried with them the phone number of the person calling. That’s how people knew whom to blame for the bill. Call-blocking services have no impact on that little packet of data: Any time you dial an 800 or 888 number, your phone number is recorded. At most call centers--in the baby formula call center, for example--the number from which you are calling is displayed on a small screen on the phone of the person taking the call. (They ask your number for verification, to keep the database accurate and to weed out people fibbing about their phone number to receive more free baby formula coupons than they are entitled to.) At many call centers, your phone number is used to automatically retrieve the information about you that was collected from previous calls and display it for the agent. The IRS first did that with tax records in the late 1970s; Domino’s Pizza is the master of it now.
Much of the work of the toll-free call now takes place inside the phone network itself. The first set of menu options you reach (“press 1 for flight arrival times, press 2 for domestic reservations. . . ‘) often comes not from the airline or credit card company you’re calling, but from AT&T;’s phone network. Companies don’t need to maintain these elaborate interactive computers--the phone companies do it, suspending, perhaps even concluding, your call in a computer somewhere without your having ever reached any place in particular. This is “the cloud’--the phrase the telecommunications world uses for the network and its elaborate array of computers. (The network is represented on routing diagrams as a little cartoon cloud, hence the name.)
Toll-free routing takes place in the cloud, basic announcement and menu features come from the cloud, and the phone companies are even offering services in the cloud that enable customers to look up balances of bank and mutual fund accounts. To the network, it’s all just data, stored and called up with touch-tones. The cloud metaphor is appropriate--the phone companies having no interest in people knowing where their vital routing computers are. But companies the size of Matrixx can now reach into the cloud with their own computers and reroute calls for maximum efficiency.
“The network is so rich,’ says Jody Wacker, who works for AT&T; selling technology and services to call center companies like Matrixx. “This has expanded the reach of many call centers. They are able to give information when they are closed. They can give information automatically and terminate a call in the network. They use their live agents for more complex transactions.’
The result is that when you call 1-800-DIRECTV, the greeting, “Thank you for calling DirecTV,’ may be coming to you from AT&T;, subbing for Matrixx, on behalf of DirecTV.
*
The roots of Matrixx lie north of Salt Lake City, in Ogden, in three warehouse-style buildings that seem especially squat against the backdrop of the Wasatch Mountains. A railroad track runs right through the property--it leads to the factory a few miles north where the rockets for the space shuttle are made. This is where an outfit called Nice Telemarketing got its start in 1976, answering calls. Kathy Carter, 49, started at Nice 19 years ago and is now a vice president for Matrixx, which bought Nice. “We started with one room, 30 phones,’ says Carter, “one phone number. It was 1-800-453-9000. We still own that number.
“Our phones had little buttons on them, and you would push the button and pick it up. There were no headphones. We were taking calls for Jerry Falwell and his ‘Jesus First’ pins. We took applications for life insurance. We sold records--the big start of that was when Elvis Presley died.’
In those days, the frugal owner of Nice had the graveyard calls routed to his house and took them himself to avoid overnight staffing. Now that Nice has been subsumed into Matrixx, there are 40 to 50 people on the overnight shift in Ogden, where Matrixx has its “main bank’ inbound call center. The room is a sea of fabric-covered cubicles on a basement-level floor. Despite the cavernous ceiling, you feel half-buried. No mountains are visible from the calling floor. Supervisors’ cubicles are glassed in and elevated from the floor, overlooking their areas like a train-yard switch-master might his tracks.
Here, the flow of calls is steady, sometimes relentless, as agents take calls for dozens of companies rather than just one. Unlike the dedicated call centers, where much is left to the judgment of the agents, the main bank is a totally scripted environment. Every call causes an appropriate script to appear on the computer screen for the operator to read from. Improvisation is not welcome. A special script is kept ready for American Red Cross fund-raising calls resulting from a disaster. There is even a script triggered by old numbers that are no longer active for offers no longer available.
Linda Thornock, 56, Susan Martinez, 40, Karen Rich, 49, and Valerie Woodruff, 24, have 23 years’ experience among them answering phones at the main bank.
“The people who call to make charitable donations are nice,’ says Susan.
“I had one lady crying from the infomercial about children,’ says Karen. “She said, ‘It’s on TV now.’ As if maybe I could see it, too. I said, “We aren’t allowed to watch our TVs when we’re working.’ ‘
“The perverts are regulars,’ says Susan, “the Pin Man, the Pantyhose Guy. We just hang up on people like that.
“I had one guy call for impotency cream, the first call I took for that product,’ she adds. “He said, ‘Do you think it would work for a guy like me?’ Like, how would I know? I said, ‘Well, sir, it comes with a money-back guarantee. . .’ ‘
In the business, Matrixx is known as a classy employer, despite the assembly-line nature of the work. At the main bank facility there are at least 30 different work schedules, to accommodate the varied needs of college students and mothers and seniors. “I have two girls, 13 and 9,’ says Rolayne Pinnow, 43. “I’m a single mom, so the hours need to work for me. You can get time off, and you don’t feel like someone has to make up for you, that you’re hurting someone else to take it.’ Matrixx also offers health insurance, profit-sharing, a 401K plan and quick advancement.
Still, there is no denying that processing calls can feel a lot like processing parts on an assembly line. Ross Scovotti, the publisher of TeleProfessional, a magazine devoted to call centers, thinks the comparison to factories is perfect, if unfairly derogatory. Scovotti goes from call center to call center for his magazine and says he has visited more of them than anyone else. “Call centers are the factories of the 21st century,’ he says. “They employ people at all levels of education. If you speak well and you are customer-centric, you can work at a call center. You don’t necessarily have to be a high school graduate, you certainly don’t have to be a college graduate. You can get full-time employment, with health care, and go to work at 8 in the morning, come home at 4 and wave to your children. Call centers provide that kind of quality of life. What is a call center? I guess it’s Utopia.’
It’s also a window on democracy, where the great, near-great and once-great dial in just like everyone else.
“I’ve had Karl Malone call,’ says Susan Martinez. “And Connie Sellecca. She was funny--she hesitated, then she gave her last name as ‘Tesh.’ She’s married to John Tesh. And I had June Lockhart. I recognized her voice, and I was so tempted to say something. But I didn’t.’
“I had a girlfriend who had Madonna call,’ says Karen Rich. “She just pushed back from the desk and screamed.’
“I had friends of Charles Manson call,’ says Linda Thornock. “They wanted to order him an air purifier because they said he didn’t like the smell of the air in prison. They wanted to order it and pay for it and send it straight to him. But I didn’t have a way of doing that. I told them they’d have to send it to him themselves.’
*
On the floor of Matrixx’s main bank, the room is filled with soft, ceaseless murmuring, the sounds of the 21st century information factory. Here, then, is the result of a century’s worth of phone technology. “Hello, this is Jennifer. How may I help you?’ “Your first name, please? Gerald? You better spell it.’ “Did you want to place an order?’ “May I have your date of birth, please?’ “Two cassettes are $19.95.’ “By ordering now, you receive a special bonus.’ “You will receive the 1970s party mix.’ “Would you be interested in a three-year or a five-year membership?’ “I absolutely agree, ma’am, that shouldn’t have happened.’ “Let me see if they have information on that.’ “It’s a full, 64-page color catalog with all the items and prices.’ “Thanks so much.’ “Thank you so much for calling.’ “Thank you for calling, your information will be sent to you within 48 hours.’ “You have a good day now.’
