How many years have we been together? I know. It’s been a long time. Why are you still here? Oh, that’s right. Because I keep paying my bills. Why am I still here? I’ve often wondered. You’ve pissed me off more times than I can count. But you know that already. Because I’ve told you many, many times, haven’t I?
My television wasn’t working this morning. I sighed, rolled my eyes and braced myself for what I figured was a few days’ worth of customer-service purgatory.
Call #1: Got the customer-service robot on the line, verifying account information, asking me what my problem was, not understanding, asking again. I pressed zero to get a customer-service human being, and the robot kept talking, not understanding and asking me to repeat. Zero. Zero. Zero. Finally she transferred my call. To purgatory.
Call #2: Got the customer-service robot on the line, jumped through the hoops and got to the “fixing the problem” part. But I answered a question incorrectly and couldn’t get her to stop. I didn’t just press zero this time, I held it down. And, poof, there was Ginny’s dad. Like magic.
Ah, Ginny’s dad. He just saved Verizon. Seriously. One guy. He walked me through the steps, sent new signals, had me push buttons, unplug and plug cords. All the while he cracked jokes, gave me a weather report from Dallas and talked about movies, Dora and Diego (and the Spanish-speaking trees) and his 3-year-old daughter.
Best of all? He got my television to work. But the bonus? His rendition of Diego’s Rescue Pack song.
Yeah. About that word … voluntarily? Well, here’s the deal.
If someone held a gun to my head and demanded all my money? It’s a pretty safe bet I would voluntarily hand over everything I had in my purse. Especially if I had my three children with me. Heck, I’d even voluntarily hand over my whole purse, which, you know, is where I keep my Visa card. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t want it all back when the jerk was arrested. And I bet your ears would perk up about the whole Visa-card part of the deal.
But, whatever. I’ve gotten about $3,000 back from the airline all on my own, thankyouverymuch. Guess I’ll have to get the rest of it on my own too.
So the Privacy Act of 1974 requires my senator to get my written consent before he can legally act on my behalf. You know. So he doesn’t look like he’s Tricky Dick or something. (Don’t turn off SafeSearch when you’re searching for Tricky Dick. Trust me.) But he needs my Social Security number. To, you know, act on my behalf.
OK. Can he get my $6,000 back? All-righty. Here’s my Social Security number. My mailing address. My property-tax records. My telephone number. My cell number. My income-tax records. My credit-card and bank-account numbers. My e-mail passwords. Anything else? My health records. DNA and blood samples. A satellite photograph of me standing in front of my house. Really. See? There I am.
Will that do? Call me, OK? You’ve got my number now.
Matthew at Childs Play x2 got a “one-time exception” for customer service from Home Decorators. Not exactly “exceptional customer service,” but he’ll take it.
I was discussing the Gates of Hell chapter of the Nightmare in Norway with someone the other night.
“I would have said, ‘I want to speak to your boss, and your boss’s boss and your boss’s boss’s boss, NOW’ … you know … go up the chain of command,” he said.
Chain of command. Yeah, the military does that to a person, I guess. Maybe that works in that world.
But, really, how much latitude does a customer-bot (we’re not human beings anymore) have in an airport before going from concerned about service to a security threat? I mean, how many times could I have told Haris, “I want to speak to your boss,” before he felt “threatened” by me and sent me spiraling into the Circles of Hell to, you know … stun guns, shackles, detention, jail … that sorta thing? I mean … really?
Besides, who’s to say Haris the employee-bot (they’re not human beings anymore either) wouldn’t have just said, “No.”
Then what?
It’s happened before. I called a “customer service” line to ask for, well, customer service. (Oh, silly me.) When I got nowhere with the employee-bot, I asked to speak to his supervisor. He put me on hold. He came back and told me his supervisor refused to speak to me.
Refused to speak to me.
I asked for the name of the president of the company. He said he didn’t know. “Well, could you check?” I asked. He put me on hold again. He came back and said, “It’s against company policy to give you that information.”
It was against company policy to tell me who runs the company.
He was right. I couldn’t find the president’s name anywhere on the company Web site. In fact, three companies were involved, and none of their contact information was available through any of the companies. I had to look them up by other means. But, hey, I found them. (I need to write a love letter to the Internet.) I sent an e-mail to all of them and the customer-service department. To their credit, they actually resolved my problem. Very satisfactorily, even.
Apparently, though, it’s become standard operating procedure that employee-bots (and their CEOs) do not work for customer-bots — even if they are in the service industry. Hell, employee-bots don’t even work for their CEOs anymore. They work for the computer screens in front of them. They can only do what their computers tell them to do, which — when it comes to customer-bots — usually isn’t much.
I suppose PR bullshit goes way back, and none of this is new. Am I the only one who can remember things like “the customer is always right” … or was that just PR bullshit too? I couldn’t help thinking about The Emporer’s New Clothes, which I recently grabbed off the shelf for my son. (I got the Virginia Lee Burton pictures from a 1968 version of the book by Scholastic Book Services.)
You call your employees co-workers and expect them (and us) to believe it?
No clothes!
You say you “work hard to earn my business every time I fly”?
No clothes!
You say, “They’ll hold the plane for you”?
No clothes!
You say, “I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do”?
No clothes!
It’s not like I’ve never gotten good customer service. I got incredible service yesterday, in fact. More than once. (I’ll write about it one of these days.) But when I get excellent or good or, heck, even fair-to-middling customer service, isn’t it a shame that it makes me want to weep with joy? Why should it be the exception and not the rule?
I ran across a few examples of suckass non-service just skimming through my feeder this morning. Matthew at Childs Play x2 warns his readers not to shop at Home Decorators. Planet Nomad writes about inexplicable weirdness at Starbucks. CrankMama has a fewchoicewords to say about Verizon. Updated: I just found this priceless exchange on Hotfessional. Updated2: Wow. They just keep coming. Karen at A Deaf Mom Shares Her World was denied service at Steak ‘n Shake.
What’s your suckiest non-service experience? Who deserves the “No clothes!” seal of disapproval?
Posted by Becky @ 10:02 am | 2 Comments 
