Remember the last time you heard that? And then you heard: “All of our customer service representatives are busy serving other customers – but please hold, your call is important to us.” Yeah, sure!
Having punched in 12 digits of an account number, 10 digits of a phone number, five digits of a zip code and our mother’s maiden name (last week it was my first pet’s name – geez!) – we sit – and sit. Time, obviously, means nothing to whomever should be talking to us (our time, that is). Our call is important? To whom? Perhaps to the phone company’s commission rep selling time by the minute, but certainly not to the jerks that caused the problem in the first place.
As a society, we have been suckered into someone’s demented idea of how the customer should be served by torturing ourselves, the customer, and not the guy that caused the problem. Having paid someone for some product or service that has failed (your junk doesn’t work, get it?), we then contribute more money in the form of time to add to our misery while waiting for some degree of salvation from this mess. Somehow purgatory has been redefined by the customer service gurus as waiting to find out just how (un)important our call really is – while enduring the top 10 worst musical selections ever invented by man interspersed with self-serving commercial announcements.
To further compound our problem, our “most important” call is more often than not routed to some distant land. Then, all of our other problems are made even more difficult by being required to speak to someone (undoubtedly a nice person) sporting a distant dialect. Yes, it is a global economy and business is done around the world. But it is not my personal job to promote this.
This just isn’t right! It runs counter to everything I’ve ever learned about how to serve and satisfy the customer. It is a process designed to escalate the dissatisfaction factor to the point of “I’ll never do business with these turkeys again!”
My customer satisfaction training was decades ago in a Sunoco service station in upstate New York run by my dad. Ten gallons of gas at 29.9 cents per gallon – pumped by somebody else – got you: 1) a clean windshield; 2) a clean rear window; 3) clean mirrors; 4) an oil check; 5) a radiator check (often painful); 6) a check of the belts and hoses; and 7) a check of the air pressure in all four of your tires – and the spare if you so chose. And, your change was counted out coin by coin and bill by bill, not dropped in your lap after some computer spit out the right answer. That, ladies and gentlemen, was customer service and it truly engendered a great deal of customer satisfaction.
What happened to us over the past few decades? How did we ever get to the point that receiving a customer satisfaction form in the mail is supposed to be the high point of our day? And when did some of the dolts that “sell” cars ask you to give them a good rating on the CSI form they hand you – rather than going the extra mile and earning the rating. Is customer satisfaction nothing more than the process of leaving a tip – when some poorly trained and unmotivated jerk expects 15 or 20 percent when he really owes you money to compensate for his ineptitude?
Wouldn’t it be nice, instead of being dispatched to telephone purgatory, if the system simply told us right at the outset to give a brief description of the problem or the reason we’re calling and then calling us back (even perhaps at a time we specify) with the solution to the problem? Or how about an email option, so that the wonderful person helping us from another part of the planet won’t have to struggle with the dialect? Or how about just getting the service or product right in the first place and skipping all the rest of this garbage?
What really bothers me today is that we may be so put out by how WE are treated as customers that we start treating OUR customers like we are being handled. If our people can’t think beyond how they’re being man-handled, they may be doing the same thing to our customers. It’s probably worth checking on.
Finally, please don’t tell me to have a nice day. It’s already been screwed up – and post-problem platitudes won’t get it unscrewed. I’d rather stay mad!
