Please Go Away, We Don’t Want to Help

After a week’s worth of skirmishes with customer service providers, I am heavily of the opinion that the idiots I spoke to this week should change their department titles from “Customer Services” to “Please Go Away, We Don’t Want to Help”. Customer service is extinct.

Naturally, companies are in business to make a profit but, unfortunately for them, customers are integral in the process. Responding to customer queries is part and parcel and while none of them would admit to holding a less-than-stellar attitude toward essential customers they have creative and devious ways to avoid them.

A real person doesn’t answer the phone anymore. Your call will be met by a disturbingly long array of automated messages such as “Have you considered our online services?” or “You may be interested in….” and “Did you know…” ad nauseam, in the hope that (a) you will use their inadequate online services, (b) you will buy something you don’t need, or (c) you will simply lose interest and go away.

Patience is not my middle name, but my persistence is right up there; it’s a virtue I nurture because it’s stood me in good stead in most aspects of life, including business dealings, and while I’m not proud of turning the air blue in my verbal response to inane automated messaging, I certainly wasn’t about to give up.

I persisted and responded to each recorded message as if I were talking to an actual person. Besides being mildly amusing it helped to imagine someone was actually carrying out an earlier warning that “this call may be recorded”.

“No, your online services won’t work, I need to speak to an actual person,” I told them. The automated recordings carried on regardless, providing equally unhelpful information about unwanted products in an annoyingly cheerful tone.

It’s been a week of customer service encounters culminating in the third and final skirmish with an insurance company to cancel an insurance policy no longer required after the end of the working week.

This was clearly a problem for the actual person I eventually spoke to, a customer services representative adept at batting aside annoying customers, who cheerfully suggested I call back on Saturday, the effective policy cancellation date.

Most likely this woman doesn’t work Saturdays, probably thinks customers are stupid or perhaps she had to urgently use the loo or her afternoon tea break was overdue. All I knew was that she wasn’t about to assist me at this particular moment.

“No!” I responded vehemently, “This is my third phone call to you people today and I’ve waited about ten minutes each time. That’s thirty minutes of my life I won’t get back and I will not call back on Saturday to go through the same thing again!”

Amazingly, my firm but polite response worked: the customer service operator changed tack and said she would email someone else in the company to cancel the policy change on the appropriate date.

Well, I wondered (silently this time, not wanting to provide an opportunity for setback) why didn’t you just offer to do that in the first place instead of frustrating and annoying me?

Isn’t the job of customer service to provide customer services? Apparently not.

I should point out that customer services traverse almost all product and service providers and are entwined in my employment history. I’m familiar with and very comfortable working with grumpy customers across various commercial operations and service providers. My experience is to ignore the old adage “the customer is always right” at your peril.

While I can see a business opportunity in providing superior customer service training, there are two major hurdles: the motivation of companies to actually want to provide meaningful customer services and the calibre of their customer service operators to deliver them.