Customer Service
By Ed Lowe
Senior Writer
Unless you're a telemarketer or a computer geek, I realize that I'm preaching to the choir. But it is time to review one of the most disturbing technological malfunctions of our 21st Century world. I'm talking about the oxymoronic phrase: "customer service."
Think, for example, about the number of times you have been told: "Your call is very important to us. Please wait for the next available operator/ technician/ service representative." And then, without being given any time frame for your wait, you are suddenly listening to insipid music which is not your style in the first place. I've partly solved that problem by investing in a speaker phone. I turn it on at that point and go about my business until, finally, I hear a ring telling me that a live representative is actually being called to the phone from his coffee break and will try to answer my
questions.
Being told that I have to wait is annoying enough, but when I want to place an order for something, the last thing I want to be told is what I have to do in order to have someone make money from my business. I have been told by operators that "You'll have to wait‚" at which point I interrupt them and tell them: "No, I don't HAVE to wait‚" and then hang up the phone. Some times, I realize that I'm cutting off my nose to spite my face, but I don't like taking orders from some little twit who has no idea about customer relations and isn't in a position to tell me that I HAVE to do anything. My boss, and once, my mother could do that. Now my wife has taken over the job, but there's a limit to my acceptance of that sort of order.
Another equally annoying message that most of us could do without is the interminable menu of options available when we make a call. We're told to "press one for English, two for Spanish." We're told that we should then "Press one for this service, two for that service" and up to "press nine if you want the menu to be repeated." I have found that by pressing "O" for operator, you can usually avoid that sort of delaying tactic. I can't understand why businessmen put their customers off in that way—it would seem to me to be counterproductive.
The same kind of resistance crops up in me when, in a department store, two or three clerks are discussing their love lives while I'm waiting to buy something. Rather than attend to the business of their employer, they prefer treating their time at work as a personal social opportunity.
Another annoyance is the need to make appointments for the most mundane kinds of service. Why, for example, should I have to make an appointment for a haircut or to have my car serviced? It would seem that the service personnel should be eager to take care of my car or to trim my ever thinning locks. I can understand an appointment for a visit to the doctor—he's busy with other patients and has to budget his time for me. But a repair shop doesn't have that kind of demands on their time and shouldn't have to force me to come in at their convenience to have the oil in my car changed.
One of the final insults is the message "We're not here to receive your call except during normal business hours of 9 a.m. to 4 p.m." I can understand this sort of message except that I'm calling during what's supposed to be their "normal" business hours. Someone apparently forgot to turn off the answering machine and the net result is that everyone in the office has a few hours of down time during which—wonder of wonders—the phone doesn't ring.
Equally annoying is the message you get from someone's voice mail telling me that "I'll be out of the office on Tuesday and Wednesday, but I'll be returning on Thursday." This is the message I frequently get when I call on Friday and there's no reason not to expect a live answer. A corollary of this is the returned email message telling me that someone will be out of the office until the day before yesterday, but still not accepting new messages and returning them.
You'll notice that all these annoyances have a common denominator—the telephone. With the fantastic improvements in phone and computer technology, we still haven't learned how to cope with the availability of things like instant messaging, voice mail, call waiting, email and Audex messages. If only we could conquer the beast that's supposedly made our lives more simple and efficient, we'd all be able to get a good night's sleep -- until the clock radio wakes us up at 3 a.m. because we forgot to set it properly. |
