Music to sooth the savage customer? Don’t count on it

Companies that run call centers — responding to complaints and requests from vocal customers — know that the job will always be done imperfectly. A new study suggests that one particular technique is likely to fail big time.

Karen Niven, a lecturer in organizational Psychology at the Univeristy of Manchester (UK)’s business school, looked at (and listened to) the music that callers hear while they are waiting to talk to a call agent. Niven’s study is called “Can music with prosocial lyrics heal the working world? A field intervention in a call center” [published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, epub July 23, 2014]. Niven writes…

—so begins another Improbable Innovation nugget, which appears in its entirety on BetaBoston.