If you’ve been dealing with companies long enough, you will notice a notable decline in their customer service. It has become impersonal and less of a service. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the so-called customer service hotline.
First off, it’s not exactly a hotline. A hotline is supposedly a direct and immediate telephone linkup, especially between heads of government, as for use in a crisis. But with most customer service hotlines you get a busy or unavailable signal. Good luck on your crisis.
If and when you get through, you will be greeted by the artificially cheerful pre-recorded voice of an integrated voice response system (IVRS). It’s like all the cheerfulness is trying to cover up the dreariness and despair you are about to step into. And sure enough, you quickly end up with a tangle of options that somehow never gives you to what you want. Choices are not always good.
So in exasperation you finally decide to just talk to an operator or customer service representative. But even that option is often buried under layers and layers of options. And when you finally find it you will have to wait to the sound of some tinny sounding song of yesteryear that goes on and on. And that’s if you’re lucky. It could just as well be a horribly irritating corporate jingle that’s definitely not catchy and definitely not cool.
When you finally get to talk to a real person, you end up with someone who just pretends to know and is just robotically reading from a script. Not much better than the IVRS. And if you’re really unlucky, he will have a heavy, impossibly unintelligible accent. But then it’s okay, because after a seeming eternity of verbal wrangling, he will pass you to another person. But then it’s not okay, because the new person is and does exactly the same. And so it goes.
Somehow, you finally succeed in getting something done, try not to imagine when you have to call again, and just take it for granted that this is how things are. Don’t! Do your part to stop this devolution of customer service: stop patronizing those offending companies. It’s not being petty, it’s how it should be.