The Nightmare that Is Dealing with Customer Service

Let’s face it, customer service has not been what it used to be for a very long time. In fact, there are companies who get agitated at their consumers who ask perfectly legitimate inquiries. When working with customer service, you will deal with your case of rude people. Granted, there is enough rudeness to go around, both with the customer service department and the people calling.  

Providing of course you actually get a hold of a real person.

Customer Service-Pretty Much Dead Come To think about It

You hit the phone to deal with your problem. You wait a little bit, wait some more, and then do the very popular, “press one for English” option that is the bane of many people who deal with customer services. Then you are put right through the list of prerecorded inquiries, where you have to press a certain number. Granted there is the trick to get a real person on the phone where you can press “0” but good luck at having that work to any degree of success. Sometimes it does, but other times you might just get thrown into another command chain of numbers until you get a real person.

Who might have to put you through to another department, where you fly right through the chain of numbers right again. The “0” must be worn out on your telephone by now as you try and get a customer service representative. You may get one, but hopefully they know something about your problem. Of course, they offer solutions that are so obviously common sense that you tried them before picking up the telephone.

Then there is the fun when you get thrown right into a Customer Service Loop. Or as I like to call it, “The Student Finance” effect, where you get sent right back to the first person who directed you to another department. You can go through this about two times, before you wish you had a landline phone so you could hang yourself with the cord.

Online customer service is not much better. You are lucky to get an e-mail response or someone in the chat if you catch them at the right them. And most of the e-mail responses tend to be quite automated and give you phone numbers where you can get more help. And more pain. If a company website has a FAQ, it won’t likely help, with the most generic problems ever.

The reason for the decline of customer service is kind of obvious. The easiest expense to cut is employees and the easiest department to cut them from is the customer service department.

So hopefully if you do contact customer service for anything, you’ll get a response. Just be sure to set aside a couple of hours of your time before doing so.