All About Pocket Knives

This is from a section of my unpublished book "Random Thought of an Old Man, I'm Right Again." The section is about things that make me mad. I believe most of us can relate to this one, having had some really bad calls.
When I need customer service for my TV, computer, one of my credit cards, it really irritates me to call and I’m greeted by a recorded voice, that really tightens my jaw. I hate phone menus! The first thing you hear is “thank you for calling…please listen carefully for our menu options have changed.” Now a voice comes on giving you the option of hearing everything in Spanish and of course I ignore it.

Now you start hearing things like "if you have an account press 1." "please say or press in your account number." Here is my favorite when nothing matches the reason for your call "if you would like to hear these options again press 9 otherwise goodbye." Everyone go ahead and scream.

Next, if you do select one of the options, you hear “we’re experiencing a higher than normal call volume, your approximate wait time will be 25 minutes or you may press one to leave us your name and number and we will return your call as soon as possible.” Or you may also hear “Your call is very important to us, all calls are answered in the order they were received, please hold and a customer service representative will be with you as soon as possible.”

Now you sit and wait on hold for 30 minutes listening to either the worst concert or 80’s music you ever heard or maybe infomercials that have nothing to do with your problem. Then when you finally get transferred to another machine you hear “so we can better serve you and for training purposes this call may be recorded.” I.... DON’T.... CARE,.... JUST GIVE ME SOMEONE TO TALK TOO!

No, you don’t get to talk to a live breathing person yet. You must now answer questions like, “please say or enter your account number.” Then the computer wants to know your first and last name, the phone number on the account, what you are calling about, do you want to continue with the automated service and no telling what else before it will transfer you to someone that will speak to you in a human voice.

It’s about now that I want to hang up or just SCREAM into the phone, but I take a deep breath, knowing that I would only sound and look very foolish yelling at a computer-generated voice. NOW…...the topper is, after you have given all your vital information to the computer a live breathing person finally comes on the line. They can never use simple names like Frank, Jim, or Susan. They have to use names like “Dilip” or “Pahi” and the first thing they say is “hello my name is…. for verification, my I have your name and the phone number on the account?” AGAIN!!! I just start counting, ONE,.... TWO,.... THREE.

At this point my blood pressure has reached a dangerous level, my voice has gone up a few decibels and sounds more like a woman’s voice than my own. I’ve been on the phone pushing buttons so long now that I’ve forgotten why I made this call in the first place as the agent finally starts to ask relevant questions. Depending on the reason for my call why can’t I have the option up front to choose the automated service or go straight to a live customer service agent with no automated questions?

You're preachin' to the choir!
Treefarmer

Many of these systems are designed expressly to get you to hang up (i.e., abandon the call) without consuming the time of an employee. There are target "metrics" for abandoned calls and if they are not high enough, then the system gets changed to make it even more frustrating for a caller to try to increase the number of abandoned calls. If you haven't already, you will soon hear an option to provide a call back number and they will promise to call you back. This is another cost saving feature because the company has to pay for the minutes that you are connected to their phone line. My experience with the call back feature is poor. Either I don't get a call back or it comes at an inconvenient time and I can't answer and then back to square one.

Another particularly frustrating aspect of customer service is that a company will bend over backwards to acquire a new customer. But if you are a loyal existing customer you get treated poorly because they know they can "get away with it". One of the first things you should think about communicating either by pushing a button or by saying to an agent is that you are considering cancelling your account. The prompts the system / person to help you or transfer your call to someone competent. What a sorry state of affairs.

During a similar call recently, after entering my name and account number the computerized voice said "we have noticed from our records that you are still receiving paper statements by mail. Would you like to convert to automated payments? If so please press 1. You will not lose your position in the waiting queue. If you do not wish to convert your account to the convenience of automated payments press 2 to be placed back in the queue.

No I do not want you to automatically deduct your payment from my bank account!!! So if after the fact I have a question or a problem you can put me on hold in this idiotic system!!! I want to see what you're charging me for first - THEN assuming I agree I'll send you my payment!

Ken

RalphAlsip wrote: What a sorry state of affairs.

Boy, do you ever have that right. The original post neglected to mention that when one finally gets to speak to an actual human, he/she is not even close to being understandable in any current version of the English language.

My wife recently was given an I phone from a friend. We were faced with setting up a new account with Tracfone for this used phone (we already had one account with Tracfone on ANOTHER phone). So we had to coordinate 1. Apple, 2. former owner account, 3. our new second Tracfone account. She was on the phone dealing with these folk for over THREE hours.

I'm another one who wants to throw the phone across the room when the menu starts.
First thing I do is press 0 as soon as the menu starts. While it's not an option they put on the menu, many companies still go to a live person when you select 0. I have noticed, however, as Ralph alluded to, the majority of companies do not acknowledge 0 in their attempt to avoid customer complaints.

Steve Warden wrote:I'm another one who wants to throw the phone across the room when the menu starts.
First thing I do is press 0 as soon as the menu starts. While it's not an option they put on the menu, many companies still go to a live person when you select 0. I have noticed, however, as Ralph alluded to, the majority of companies do not acknowledge 0 in their attempt to avoid customer complaints.

I do that too. After a few times listening to all the options and then at the very end I'm told to press zero to speak to someone, I learned that pressing zero right from the start can sometimes get me a real person right away.

And these are the same companies that you get at least 10 robo calls a day from! ftd

Everything said is entirely accurate. I called THree times to get a chemotherapy order
clarified with a physician last week. Never got to talk to a live person. Voice mail
only. Physician's office NEver call back. Not only an inconvenience but DAngerous.

Is this any progress?

Bob

I too am frustrated with all of the delaying tactics we must deal with to get a simple request taken care of. Sometimes you just have to suck it up and comply to the rehotic, that’s not rollin over its just getting the job done. Here is a sussegtion that may help when a sales person contacts you on the phone. They will say at the beginning of the call that “this call will be recorded” what I have found if you reply that you Do Not want to be Recorded, you may have to say it emphatically a couple of times, but as soon as they realize what you just said they will hang up immediately . And hopefully they will put you on a no call list Bing Go we have a winner.

As if the phone menus aren't bad enough, by the time you actually get to talk to a person, that individual is most often an idiot. When you go to the mall, grocery store, or anywhere else, you see all those morons that do nothing but stare at their phones all day?

Well, I got news for you. They are the ones you'll be speaking with when you do get a live person on the other end.

____________
Mike

I hate when I press 1 for English and they connect me with osama bin laden's sister...

I hate it too, but they had no choice when you have thousands of people calling every day wanting to know how to plug in their new computer. lol

For English, Press One. Para Espanol, something another two. Getting a bit sick of that. You rarely get a live person, and when you do, it's typically someone from India who can barely understand the English language. Typically, I call our local branch of whatever. Unfortunately, a lot of places are getting rid of that, going to their main call center, which is almost always overseas.

I like the insurance company ones.
To pay a policy straight through.
To make a claim one and half hours wait.

Grant

Some of the menus require that you first listen to a few minutes of advertising before you can even start the selection part.
Our societies are getting increasingly frustrating to navigate and in some people the frustration boils over into shooting other people.
Major corporations need to stop trying to pinch every penny and try to actually provide helpful support to their customers. All of us need to try to be more helpful toward others.
kj

kootenay joe wrote:Some of the menus require that you first listen to a few minutes of advertising before you can even start the selection part.
Our societies are getting increasingly frustrating to navigate and in some people the frustration boils over into shooting other people.
Major corporations need to stop trying to pinch every penny and try to actually provide helpful support to their customers. All of us need to try to be more helpful toward others.
kj

From phone menus to killing people is a mighty big jump, kj.
I don't buy it.

Phone menus that confound all who call is one of the many frustrations that cumulatively could push a person over the edge.
The near 100% reliance on electronics for communication further isolates people from developing a real connection with others.
Frustrating phone menus on their own are not the cause of homicidal behaviour. They are more a sign of the times in which so much seems beyond our control.
kj

We all agree that phone menus are a bad product of our time. However, the one I think that may be as bad or worse is all the retailers that you go into now days, when you get to the checkout, they want a whole bunch of personal information and you have to stand there and listed to a credit card spiel before they will even take your money. They want you to sign up for an account with them and they are very insistent. The last time this happened to me, the clerk wanted me to pay with their credit card and give me a discount, yada, yada, yada. I asked if they accepted cash US dollar, and I finally had to tell him I just wanted to pay and get going. He went into another spiel for something else, and that any personal information would not be sold or traded. Finally, a supervisor happen to walk by and overheard our "conversation" and asked me if there was a problem. I told him I just wanted to pay for my purchase and get going, to which HE started in that all the preceding was the company policy and yada, yada, yada. I told him my policy was going to be to buy all the items I had laying on their counter somewhere else, and I left.

OLDE CUTLER wrote:We all agree that phone menus are a bad product of our time. However, the one I think that may be as bad or worse is all the retailers that you go into now days, when you get to the checkout, they want a whole bunch of personal information and you have to stand there and listed to a credit card spiel before they will even take your money. They want you to sign up for an account with them and they are very insistent. The last time this happened to me, the clerk wanted me to pay with their credit card and give me a discount, yada, yada, yada. I asked if they accepted cash US dollar, and I finally had to tell him I just wanted to pay and get going. He went into another spiel for something else, and that any personal information would not be sold or traded. Finally, a supervisor happen to walk by and overheard our "conversation" and asked me if there was a problem. I told him I just wanted to pay for my purchase and get going, to which HE started in that all the preceding was the company policy and yada, yada, yada. I told him my policy was going to be to buy all the items I had laying on their counter somewhere else, and I left.

That's one of the many things I think that killed Kmart/Sears; along with Radio Shack. Around here, these were the WORST stores to start with that credit card nonsense.

I'm with you on this with one exception. In my experience it is not names like "Dillip" or "Pahi" - often when I speak to a live person they SAY their name is "Bill" or "Fred" but their accent says "Jugdish" or "Apu"