Customer Service? What the hell is that? The rules have changed. Customer service is out - "we don't give a bleep!" is in. Nice people are shooting strangers, polite people are becoming rude. As feelings of frustration intensify from indifference from those providing products and services, tempers flare and normally docile people are being reduced to raging maniacs.
Customer service assistance used to be the answer when you had a problem. If a problem could not be resolved, a supervisor could often make things right. Many businesses had local offices where customer service problems could be resolved in person. Deregulation, voicemail, the Internet, outsourcing of employment, and devaluation of customers not only took away authority from those able to rectify problems, but it also removed places you could go to file a complaint in person.
Just try resolving a problem or dispute with any large corporation these days. Today, dialing a customer service number starts a predictable chain of events:
First comes the procrastination; I dread making the call because I can already predict the end result pretty darn accurately. But being one who dislikes continually being taken advantage of by corporations, I just have to make an effort, hoping that maybe customer service is coming back into vogue.
When dialing the telephone number, my defenses begin raising up like concrete walls to protect me from them, and them from me. As the phone rings my heart rate increases as I am already anticipating the confusing voicemail options and the game of trying to guess which number will get a real person to answer. And then it starts. "That number is not an option", or even better, "We are experiencing a high volume of calls so please call back later", and then... click! The friggin' phone is dead.
When someone finally does answer with the standard "How can I provide you with excellent customer service?" I am distracted from the paperwork I worked on while waiting on hold for an hour. With my neck now in a kink, I would just love to reply with "It would be the first time", but I'm still in "Bridget, be nice" mode, so I proceed to again repeat my problem.
Somehow, all of my previous calls that I thought were documented in the computer have now disappeared. Asked to repeat all the same information yet again, I begin to feel the ugly rage monster roaming around inside my chest. My voice starts getting louder as it becomes increasingly difficult to keep my sarcasm out of the conversation.
I again hear the clicking of a keyboard while I am talking to the customer service person, while I envision all those previously lost keystrokes floating around somewhere in outer space. I'm beginning to believe my conversations are being deleted upon completion just to test my endurance. How many times can we lose her before we force her to call the crisis clinic to deflate her frazzled emotional state?
If you really want to amuse yourself, try to convince a company they owe you money for lost time, wages, and therapy appointments. Most of us have spent too many long hours waiting for something to be delivered that arrived late, defective, or not at all. Then there is the time spent calling repeatedly about a problem. I have yet to be compensated other than a small credit on my bill for my lost time and nothing for my insanity issues.
What finally unleashes the rage monster is when I have done nothing wrong and I have to pay the price for a company's incompetence. Unfortunately, the only one available to take the wrath is some poor soul who needs a job and ends up working for a company that doesn't give two shits about their customers.
To add insult to injury and due to outsourcing of jobs to other countries, often the customer service clerks do not have the English speaking skills to be understood. Although difficult on those of us who have good hearing, broken accents are even more difficult on someone who has hearing problems.
So, after running through the maze, being left on hold (haven't even mentioned that horrible elevator music) and being told there is nothing that can be done, I once again give up any hope of resolving the problem and the company once again wins. Damn. I guess I'll just have to take comfort in something a very wise woman once said: "Karma's a bitch." They'll get theirs.
***Blog topic compliments of Cingular Wireless, HP, & DishNetwork (in case you were wondering).
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