Real Life Adventures by Gary Wise and Lance Aldrich for March 19, 2023

TrueTrueTrue

In the old days, they acted like they really cared about you.

Try pressing zero.

There was a recent study about customer service rage. It noted that customers actually start out these phone calls with pretty good will toward the company. IF they get an actual person right off the bat (which is increasingly rare), the interactions are almost always resolved amicably. With each level of automated garbage they have to go through, they become increasingly angry, and by the time they reach an actual person (IF they ever get to speak to an actual person), they are rude and often snap at the poor human representative.

As if we needed a study to tell us.

They always start with two lies:

“Your call is important to us” and

“Listen carefully. Our menu has changed.”

Since I am moving I am going thru ‘agent hell’ right now contacting all of the utilities. Got it all done, THEN they moved back the closing date! I almost jumped off of a bridge.

Customer Service? A misnomer if I ever heard one.

I’ve just been through that with my new cell phone, and the blasted thing still managed to dump all my facebook and messenger contacts!

The one I simply cannot fathom is going into a brick-and-mortar store with a problem and was told “We can’t help you. You have to call the help desk.” I was not the only one sitting in the corner of the store talking to the help desk.

If you are speech impaired you call 711 with an app which gets you a relay operator who then types to you what is being said by the machine or representative. Did you ever play grapevine when you were a kid? Say something into a line of people and see what comes out the other end ? Relay operators are very good and a necessity but have an impossible task. Most companies don’t have chat, you can’t get an email address and they don’t spend $3 for an app or $250 for a machine so you can type to them. Fortunately this only happens to me about once a year for several weeks due to a medication side effect. I can not imagine the hell of living it daily.

IVR (Interactive Voice Response) was spawned in the ninth circle of Hell. (Yeah. I said it!) And within that circle is also housed the database of “hold” music.

He should have added “operator” to the list of spoken requests. It’s worked for me sometimes.