By Ed Lowe
Senior Writer
My generation has had a tough time keeping up with the technological revolution of our era. When I went to school, there was no such thing as a computer We did have rudimentary calculators — then called slide rules — but electronics were in their infancy. I grew up in the golden age of radio. Chicago was the hub of the soap opera business and many network programs originated here. Our memories of those days are preserved in Bruce Dumont's Museum of Broadcast Communication.
But later, I was delighted when television came on the scene. That meant that we could enjoy programming that wasn't available at the movie palaces scattered through all of the City's neighborhoods. We were able to watch "Hopalong Cassidy," "Howdy Doody," "Mary Hartline" and a whole range of other programs which appeared on the tiny flickering screen. True, the quality of the picture wasn't great and it was only in black and white, but it was new and folks would huddle around the screen to observe the latest antics of Desi and Lucy.
There were sports events too. The Gillette-sponsored Tuesday night fights were always a drawing card. We would bet on the feature bout. Not knowing anything about the fighters who were scheduled to battle in the ring, we would bet on the guy wearing white trunks or black ones regardless of their skills. It gave us something to root for. We also watched the World Series baseball games when they were finally available on a coast-to-coast network. NFL football and a range of other sports weren't to come along until much later.
And then along came computers. They delivered on their promise to make work easier and make workers able to accomplish more during their working hours. I have been using one of them since I learned DOS programs and had a computer that took minutes to boot up and even longer to find a program that I wanted to use. For printed copies of my documents, I had a dot matrix printer that printed one line at a time very slowly. Watching the machines do their jobs was amazing and a real advance in the process of writing and editing the material I was cranking out on the keyboard.
I can remember simple telephones that required dropping a nickel into a slot before the operator would connect you with the number you were calling. You would tell the operator the number you wanted, she would connect you.
Phones have become a lot more complex since those days. In fact, they have become so complex that they have begun to reverse the progress they have made. People have discovered that, by using some of this new phone technology, they actually don't have to spend any time working. Features like voice mail, call waiting and speed dialing are all useful to a point. But now, users have become abusers and the features have begun to frustrate people making calls to phones that have them.
The most unpleasant feature of telephones is the programmed responses that tell you that by pressing "1," you will get another menu in English or by pressing "6" you'll be connected to another program which will instruct you on how to pay your bill by credit card. There are programs that cover all nine numbers on the push button phone but which don't really respond to the reason you're making the call in the first place.
The companies that try to improve their customer-related efficiency fail miserably when they don't realize that they are wasting untold hours of their customers' time through the weight of these instructions. They tell us "Your call is very important to us," and then they make us wait for uncounted minutes until someone finally picks up the phone and tell us that "Your call may be monitored for quality control." All the while, they are connecting us to someone who doesn't have a clue as to what our problem is nor any idea of how to solve it.
Another of my pet peeves in the phone arena is getting on a "customer service" line with someone in Bombay or Bangladesh who can't speak comprehensible English and who is reading solutions to complex problems from a cheat sheet that doesn't address the issues that prompted the call. In addition, they usually don't have the ability to refer the call to someone who can respond sensibly to the problem. I have gotten to the frustrating point with some of these "customer service" personnel that all I can do is ask to speak to their supervisors. One time, by actual count, I had to repeat the simple phrase "Please let me speak to your supervisor" 18 times before I was finally connected to someone (a) I could understand and (b) who had the ability to comprehend my problem — and then, that supervisor referred me to someone else who had the authority to resolve the issue.
The amount of time I spent on the phone was way beyond anything practical. Of course, the company didn't mind because they paid so little for their personnel in Bombay or Bangladesh that they could afford to have them spend time listening to my increasing frustration. Later, I received an email from the company asking me to rate their customer service. Boy, did I have fun with that one! The problem is that no one in a position to change the way they respond to customer requests ever sees the survey — or they write me off as a crank and ignore what I have said about their level of service.
All these efforts to shift the responsibility for customer service to off-shore boiler rooms are in the interest of cost control. The problem is this: Whose costs are they trying to control? My time has a value to me even though they don't feel it has any worth to them. If I have to wait until their technology allows them to respond to my needs, I should be able to put that wasted time into something more practical — like finding another company that actually responds to problems in a prompt, efficient and realistic way. If you happen to know the name of one, please send me a note at the paper — your call is very important to me.
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