Give us this day our daily customer service experience – the state of what we get is worse than ever. Up a 5am this morning ready for international travel. First – to reduce the blunt impact trauma of a “roaming” phone bill after traveling – a call to my carrier to set up a plan for email, data and voice. Easy. NOT. Twenty five minutes into a maddening call with a young overly keen, but pleasant, chap in India, we finally establish a phonetic method to understand each other. I was so frustrated I just said, “yes, whatever, gotta go, cab downstairs, thank you, bye” – and don’t actually know if I’m covered.
Then into the cab ready for smile and dial travel advisory calls to the banks (owners of my cards) to inform them of my travel – apparently this is for my protection? Perhaps a more fitting name for the banks would be “our self indulged service”. I have the telephone numbers stored in my phone. To my surprise, this takes me several calls, several connections and several confusions (on their part) per bank, spanning 20 minutes each. Arriving at JFK (we won’t mention security) I slip into the lounge and am given a card to use for the wireless service that has 16 digits for me to enter. 16! After 3 attempts I’d cracked it.
I had to write. I spent over 1 hour of my time this morning doing stuff – that these brands demand – that should have taken less than 5 minutes each. One hour – do you get that amount time even to your self? Guess how emotionally connected I am about these brands. LOTS of emotion. My advice is a simple solution, just think about the words “customer service” and start from there – and you can record it for quality assurance.
PUNCH & KISS 