to vote for favorites. Only 6 votes needed to get on the list.I have just finished talking to customer service at my cell phone company and what a bright and sunny disposition that has left me in. I have given up on getting good customer service from modern companies. I would settle for not being in a murderous rage when I am done.
How difficult is it for a company with billions in revenue to operate two 800 numbers, one that they list on their English site and one on the French. Why am I pressing “1″ for service in English?
I do not care if you have recently updated your menus. I do not want to listen to all eight menu choices before pressing a button. None of which seem to match my request anyway.
Everyone knows this call may be recorded for quality assurance. To date, the recordings do not seem to have assured any quality at all. I think it would be far more revealing to record the string of expletives that are muttered into the phone prior to reaching an actual person.
I’m on hold. I get it. I have to wait. Interrupting the musak every 30 seconds to tell me that you appreciate my call and that it will be answered in the order it was received makes me angry. Your reassurances that my call is important to you are only valid if they are not spoken by the voice of a machine.
How often do you think I phone my cell phone company? I do not know my account access pin. I do not know the exact amount of my last bill. I do not know my customer number. Doesn’t the call display reveal that I am calling from the phone you are trying to verify I own? I am phoning to turn off the text message notification of missed calls. Is this seriously a security concern? I find it hard to believe that people are spending ten minutes on hold to make innocuous feature changes on someone else’s phone plan.
Automated voice systems are high tech pieces of shit. The only thing I have ever heard is “I’m sorry. I did not understand your response. Please restate your answer. Are you phoning for… Sales, or… Support?” After several attempts at this I am inevitably reduced to telling an inanimate collection of circuits and software to go fuck itself, which, ironically, I have found to be fairly effective. When the system interprets a string of elaborate cursing as undecipherable gibberish it reroutes you to an operator. Score one for the good guys.
Eventually you do reach a human being. In this case a young woman with a pleasant voice who tells me she is here to help. My replies are short staccato bursts that convey my white knuckle grip on the phone. In response you can hear an edge to her voice that betrays her efforts to remain pleasant. If, at that moment, I was not contemplating the complete and violent destruction of her company, I would feel sorry for her. It must be a tough job, being the human being at the end of that frustrating labyrinth that leads to customer service. I bet she ends her days wondering why everyone is such an asshole.
3 votes 
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