Alla Klein: a fake person in charge of customer support | Hacker News Reader

Alla Klein: a fake person in charge of customer support

code.dblock.org

72 pointsdblock34 comments

I remember setting up a website back in the 90s for a construction equipment company. They had no way of easily tracking leads from the website versus people who just saw them in the yellow pages or something. So, their solution was to have a fake salesman's name on the website.

People would call and ask for him, and the caller would be told he was out of the office and someone else would be happy to help out. Meanwhile they'd know right off the bat how that customer got their number.

The first company I worked at would advertise with different extensions, such as (800)555-1212 x 123 in different publications, when we answered the phone and somebody asked for x123, we would just log what they requested and say "I can help you with that..."

I think the point of creating a "fake" person is so everyone involved can provide the support when ever they are available, and it looks like a unified source. I've done this a few times and it works very well, rather then having different people constantly responding.

Actually, in this case, they made sure only one person was on a thread at a time, to make sure "Alla" had a consistent voice.

Ah, a page out of the Citibank playbook. (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870354560457540...)

Great story

And Danny Sullivan is quoted!

It looks like the lesson to take from this is not to create a fake persona for customer service, but to provide exemplary support. Other than the customers looking for a date, I doubt that satisfaction would be lower if "Alla" was actually "Daniel".

There is the case where your name is not common or not recognized easily by your target audience. I have a french name (Julien), try and pronounce that so an american knows what you are talking about (we target construction workers). Maybe the response wouldn't be "who are you again?" if my name was John or Eddy.

I assume non-Francophone English speakers would pronounce Julien like the English "Julian".

My first name is the same as my username. In both email messages and phone calls, I am inevitably called Marty, Martin, or something else that is close to my name but still wrong. I like to think that it helps people remember me, and that in this globalized age (where small software companies can sell to people in 40 countries), it is not preventing me from getting or keeping clients.

edit: I guess I have not really responded to your comment, since you are talking about having people understand how to pronounce your name when you tell them. I am not sure that was applicable to the author's situation, since his company was selling in 40 countries, all of which might have different ideas about how to pronounce "Alla". For example, Alla is not a common name in the United States, while Daniel is.

I'm Guillaume. I regularly tell people to just call me "William" :)

William is my uncle, not me. When people struggle I just tell them it's 2 syllables: Gui and Ohm. They go oh! and get it right from then on.

In our case we shared the support load between two people behind one name.

This reminds of of a story. I once worked at a place that would transfer solicitors and similar callers to our fake employee Helen Wait's voicemail (pronounced hell 'n wait). "Can I speak to somebody about where you buy your paper products?" "Sure, let me transfer you to Helen Wait."

When AOL was Q-Link, we did something similar; all of our newsletters were written by "Jenny Crocker" (Betty's daughter, we decided). It was convenient to have a representative character that always spoke in a consistent voice, yet could be staffed by multiple people. At first we were coy about whether she was real, but it eventually became an in-joke among the entire user base.

Ronald McDonald isn't just one clown, either.

I have to agree with martey here: the way you did support is fantastic, creating a fake persona is not. People like honesty and hate being fooled. If your customers found out about Alla, I think they would be very upset. Especially the ones who asked her out!

That would have been really funny at a .com I was a developer at: our support persona was the CEO's dog's name...

At the end of the day I don't think customers care whether it's a script, person or alien solving their problem. All that matters is a great experience and a resolved issue.

So if I told you that I wasn't a person but in fact a 15-person team who posts comments across the web, you wouldn't be weirded out? :P

Using a pseudonym for customer support is a fairly accepted practice. Unfortunately, when it's your job to deal with a lot of customers you're inevitably going to have some that are unhappy with your response, no matter how well you do your job or how great your company is. If you deal with enough customers (thousands) over time, some of those unhappy customers are going to try to track you down outside of work and make your life difficult.

Customer want honesty from a company / service and good customer support. They want to be able to reach the contact they talked with before again, at the same name / extension. I don't think they generally care very much if the name they're given is the operator's legal name, so long as there is a consistent response from the pseudonym.

Especially if you have an easy to Google name (you're not "John Smith"), using a pseudonym for customer support means you can leave your job at the office at the end of the day and not worry about risk to yourself or your family.

I'd argue that a pseudonym is /very/ different from having all support responses come from a a fake person. "tomkarlo" could be a pseudonym and I'd be fine interacting with you...but if I find out that "tomkarlo" is actually 12 employees at Microsoft posting on boards across the web, I'd be very upset.

Now, 15 years later I totally agree. I definitely had all of the intentions of fooling clients into believing that I had a bigger company than I actually had - inventing personnel speaks for itself. I wouldn't do it again.

Do your clients really need to know the size of your staff?

The most intriguing part is about the BVI incorporation and the cash withdrawals in Geneva. Do you plan to elaborate on that in a further post? Is it worth the trouble?

Back in the early 90s, I worked for a very small (12-ish people) technical graphics software company. The CEO and lead coder would help with tech support calls when we were slammed, but he would use a pseudonym to make it appear that we were a larger, more established company than we were.

I think that it may have been a more appropriate facade then, but there are quite a few precedents for very small companies providing stellar service and support now so customers should be a little less anxious about buying boutique software.

Interesting. Our CEO makes a point of identifying himself by name when he jumps on a support call or email. I figured he figures it makes people feel special, or he just likes being straightforward.

In Boston there is a column for gay men to write anonymously to for help and advice with their medical issues (especially sexual and psychological).

It's called "Ask Dr. Cox". (hurr, hurr)

"Dr. Cox" is actually a pseudonym for a small group of physicians who respond to the questions. Nevertheless the idea of having a single "name" and "face" to address your concerns to seems to be working -- and it helps these doctors contribute to a much-needed service without occupying too much time from any one of them.

Is that known to be more effective than "Ask the Docs?"

Is Alla Klein a veiled reference to their search engine, Alkaline? Is this just a more elaborate version of "Let me Google that for you" ?

Yes. You could call it "lack of imagination" :)

We had done something like this for my first attempt at a startup. We had this product in India, and my name as well as those of our co-founders can be spelled in many ways. This can be confusing. So we picked a name which is like the most common name in India, which nobody gets right.

The Alla Klein approach is also used when CS moves to Bangalore behind the scenes...

>She was also asked on a couple of dates.

Maybe things were different in the 90s (well, I know they were) but celebrating the success of your support offering based on gender isn't great advice to offer others.

Wow, Myabe it depends on the business but I used to work in customer service in a retail company's call centre and we used to send out letters with our own names on them.

We have someone like this. Her name is Christine.

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