I would like to take a moment and discuss the government plot that is customer service. That is correct, a fairly thought out plan of the Obama cult that runs this country(which is impressive for a group that thrives on no plan at all). I think that somehow Obama convinced large companies that they needed to hire a crap load of people to do customer service during his tenure so that the unemployment numbers would look good in this crappy economy. Faced with this request, the companies have had to create reasons to use these millions of people.
I think the conversation went like this:
Obama: Hire the unemployed
Big Companies: We don't need people right now. We are making money and running smoothly.
Obama: You won't pay taxes for the rest of your life
Big Companies: We'll get right on it
The job applications looked something like this:
Now Hiring
People who are alive
Must sound very, very happy
Must know a ton of old exclamatory responses
School: To cool for…
7 + 3 = Purple
Last job: A lady paid me $3 to stop peeing and sleeping on her stoop
So now these previously fine tuned companies needed to have these newly unemployed employees (NUE) do something so they hashed out a plan. They were going to randomly select, oh, ALL of their customers and create a problem for them in order to have them call customer service which is where they had placed the above NUEs.
Still not convinced?
Let me tell you about just a few of my latest interactions with customer service. The most recent one was with a company called thredUp. You send them all of the kids clothes you would like to sell them as if it were a garage sale. They will give you a dollar amount for them in credit towards buying other kids clothes on their site. I know. It sounds magical; so magical it was even featured on Good Morning America. So I sent them a bag of triplet clothes and got a $36 credit. Now here was the catch. Every time I tried to purchase the items it would ask me for my credit card information for totals as high as $0.10 and $1.45. These are not typos but the actual amount I owed after my transactions. The little red caption stated that my address did not match my credit card information which I knew for a fact was not true. I sent off an email to their customer care and was sent back a prompt standard email that read that I should (Captain Obvious voice here) check if my address matched my credit card information. I sent another email stating that I had already tried this incredible feat and if they had any other savvy advice. Again I received the same email. That is when I sent an email that read something like,
You can keep my $36 dollars and I will give you $36 of bad advertising on social media. Have a human call me if you have any better suggestions.
In a day, I received a human customer service agent's phone call asking me if she could help.She was so polite and happy. "Golly that sounds just horrible, Mrs. Harris" She would also put me on hold just about every time I finished a sentence. I pointed out the above problems and she had the nerve to tell me that after conferring with the technical supervisors she was to inform me that I should check if I had enough funds and if the address was correct. (Really, you needed to confer with a pro for that advice?) I told her that I was loaded (in pennies) and did indeed have the $0.10 in escrow for her and that I did live at my address. She then sounded worried and after saying several outdated explicatives like "darn tooting " and "gone dangit" told me that "just this once" she would override that security measure so I could shop. I bought two shirts and a pant for Carlos that used cost the same as if I would have bought them new at Old Navy and luckily, was allowed to make my purchase.
Here is where the government job thing comes in. Not even five minutes after the phone call, I receive an email from thredUP's Knitwit department (I did not make this up. They actually believe in truth of advertising) that asks me if I was satisfied with the care I received and if my problem was solved. There was only a "yes" and "no" checkbox. No comment section. Nada. I decided not to answer this email because the truth is "yes" the idiot woman was very nice and I have no beef with her but also true is that I wouldn't have needed to talk to her if their website worked in the first place.
The Apple issue was (if problems are masterpieces) the flipping Cistene Chapel of errors. The nice folks at Apple have some great gadgets but boy are they temperamental. Any video I took with my iPhone would not download on to my computer when I plugged it in. Plugging in my phone directly into the computer is the only way to download video. I know this from a 3 hour "service" phone call with Apple earlier this year. But this was a new problem. My computer refused to recognize my phone. Like Lady Gaga refuses to recognize that all her stuff was done by Madonna 20 years ago. Whatever the case I called Apple and had to go through a computerized set of questions and press buttons until my fingers bled. However, I did note that if I were to press all of the buttons I had to push fast enough I played the tune for Loverboy's Waiting for the Weekend . When I did reach a genius (Again,this is not a sarcastic insult. They actually call themselves geniuses. The insults come later.) When I did reach said genius one hour later (no lie) he told me that this was actually an easy fix. This made the hairs on the back of my neck rise up because you know what always happens when people say this. When he wasn't busy putting me on hold, he led me through an elaborate set of instructions that ended with my screen going black with a poison emoticon on it. Maybe it was just blank but that is how I saw it. He told me not to worry that if I followed the next 100 steps that my computer would reboot. An hour after that, he told me he was going to put me on hold and have a super genius help me. When the super team leader did get on the line and brought my computer back from the dead I had been put on hold 15 times and on the phone for three hours. My problem wasn't fixed yet but my computer was back up.
It took them less than 24 hours to ask me how I felt about my care. Were they serious? My care of what exactly? The problem I had or the problems they created?
The latest problem I have is with Safelite Autoglass. These guys are the true winners here and by winners I mean the people who must have signed a deal with the devil for hiring the most incompetent people I have ever met. They installed my windshield with a 100% lifetime warranty (If I read the fine print it means if I have a warranty they will spend a lifetime avoiding answering my concern.) and after the window was put in incorrectly it rusted the entire frame of the car. I will save you the details but know that one month, nine hours, two body shop quotes have gone by and the "Executive Specialist" I was speaking to just stopped answering calls and emails 3 weeks ago. Today after a one hour conversation with a very nice, sweet lady executive who put me on hold at least five times to speak to her "Team Manager" I was informed that Kim Burgess had been out on maternity leave. Then she had the balls to tell me, "So you know what that means?" I quickly replied that I didn't because I had spent most of my child's first months of life on the phone with people like her. She sputtered a handful of "Oh by gosh!" and "Cheepers" but before she could go on I asked if it was all right if I put her on a brief hold. I then went and put the triplets to bed, made my lunch, started a load of laundry, caught up on some emails and after about forty minutes, returned to the phone.
"Hi, are you there? Sorry to keep you holding," I said. Then I said, "Now where was I? Oh yes. Bye" and hung up. And if you are wondering, yes a survey is sitting in my email box.
As I sit here on hold I thought about what the mechanism is for these customer care companies and here it goes. Two hundred recently employed people sit in a room with the one person (Team manager) who actually received any training. They are told to say nice things and ask for the problem. Once they have the concern they are to put the customer on hold while they stand in line to ask the only real employee what they should do next.(They are used to standing in unemployment lines so this seems easy) The hold button is also used so they can play a round of video games or catch up on episodes of "Scandal" because no one wants a stressed out, newly employed employee do they?
But what I really think that hold button is for is so that they can spew real, down and dirty, just purely filthy bad words like they had a raging case of Tourette's Syndrome. How else can they get right back on the phone and pleasantly tell you that after keeping you on hold for an hour they and their trusty Team Member were not able to find that phone number you wanted or fix anything you just asked for?
This is where I have a problem. I was treated very nicely by all of these recently employed customer care employees. I wish that they could all continue to have a long, productive life of video game playing, tv watching, filth spewing employment but the truth is in my perfect world these companies would just do their jobs right thus nullifying the need for customer care altogether and thus firing all of their asses so I don't have to be subjected to product sabotage that helps Obama's unemployment numbers look good. And it would also save me hours of needless surveys that I wouldn't have to take in the first place if the companies just did their jobs right. But I get it, Obama must be behind all of this incompetency. It is truly the only reason I could think of why so many American companies blow.
Well tomorrow I will start my phone calls to the medical billing office who overcharged me (why don't they ever undercharge you?), the Water company and finally the hold, hold, mother hold IRS.Nightline just had an episode on the fact that only 30% of people calling the IRS were able to speak with someone during tax season. Well I am here to tell you all that you didn't miss a thing. I reached someone who was THE nicest incompetent person I have ever had the pleasure of speaking to and they did ABSOLUTELY nothing I asked them to do so I have to call their holding asses again.
I just wonder what the employment numbers will look like when everyone in America loses their jobs because they had to be on hold with customer service and filling out surveys but I don't think Obsma thought this far out yet.
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