Has anybody noticed that as corporate productivity goes up, customer productivity goes down? Can we get that on the record in the great balance sheet in the sky, along with other calculations of the real costs of doing business, like carbon footprints and toxic waste?
I’m talking about how many hours it takes on the phone with “customer service” just to get to the point where you finally have not only a human being on the other end of the line, but a Level 2 Tech, that mythical wizard behind the curtain who understands your issue but who can’t give out a direct phone number, and who puts you on hold until your call gets dropped. This is where much of my time goes when I’m not working—trying to fix something that some company has screwed up. I have spent as much as two hours on one phone call, waiting to get to that Level 2 Tech so that I can start all over again. I’m sure you have too.
Then there’s the extra level of irony that while we’re hung up on hold, the profits of “productivity,” in the form of corporate wealth and outrageous executive salaries, are being spent on buying nutcase politicians who are going to make our lives even more miserable with plans like denying birth control to women, denying climate change as the world self-immolates, outlawing critical thinking (see the platform of the Texas Republican party), and projecting their psychopathology onto the poor—who are poor, they think, because they just want to be leeches on society.
In a conspiracy theory interpretation, it feels like a diabolically productive initiative to keep us busy and distracted while they finish us off, demolishing voting rights for poor people, students, minorities and old folks, so as to emasculate the inconvenience of democracy; outsourcing what’s left of our jobs; killing off the few unions that remain; shredding the social safety net; and completing Orwell’s vision: Please hold. Your call is very important to us.
Amen.
Then, there’s this…just in case you get enough critical-thinking skills to make it into what passes for higher education nowadays (not news to you, Barbara, I’m sure):
How The American University was Killed, in Five Easy Steps
http://junctrebellion.wordpress.com/2012/08/12/how-the-american-university-was-killed-in-five-easy-steps/
Just the title makes this a must-read. Thanks for the link–and I recommend it (note to my readers: it’s long, so pull up a cup of tea or something stronger and get out your affirmations in advance so you won’t go to the dark side by step three). As this article points out, the effort is really to kill public education in general because it’s so damned annoying when you have a public that, like, thinks about shit. It is astonishing, though, how quickly such extermination can be carried out when there’s enough ad money behind the effort. (Hello?! Are all you people watching Mad Men thinking critically about why you’ve been glued to this story for four years? It’s an archetype!)
The next wave I see coming in the destroy-higher-education tsunami is eliminating teachers altogether: that’s where the online, open-source curriculum thing is going. The only fly in the ointment, at least in my department (English composition) is that you need to grade papers–but not to worry! The solutions being worked out are computer grading (challenging because computers don’t understand what the hell they’re reading) and peer grading (I’m not kidding). Welcome to the Lord of the Flies model of education.
And as well as all that, Barbara, there’s the hold music!
How funny–I had a line about that in my draft post, about how the “music” seems designed to be so annoying that you will eventually hang up yourself. Thank you for noting this important advance in productivity design.
I wish I didn’t agree so wholeheartedly. I’m in the process of trying to get a new computer. I would sound like a boring stand-up comic if I started to describe all the things that have inhibited this simple process. Worst of all, I sat myself down and asked if possibly all this is really a result of an aging senility on my part of which I have been blithely unaware.
Would that the problem were so contained.
But I am at least finally sitting at a functioning computer, which feels like my mega accomplishment for the month. Now if I can get my data transferred by one of the three or four methods that have worked in the past…
And just being able to comment on your post is a liberating break. Thank you!
Yeah, that blame-it-on-yourself thing is another insidious subliminal theme from Corporateworld that is often even articulated openly as their first line of defense: I recently had a printing job go horribly awry (the art work looked like some alien bar code, pages were upside down or missing, and so on) and Xerox tried to tell the printer that my PDF must have been corrupt–but before their machine went haywire, it had printed a perfect galley copy, which I had examined page by page and approved. Sixty-five unrecognizable copies later, they tried to send me the blame; I think they do that just to see if you’ll give up.
Congratulations on persevering!
My favorite customer service story is when, as the Personal Representative of my brother’s estate, I tried to get information from his employer–a mega-big company–about his insurance and IRA, etc. I was told they had to have his signature on some forms before they could give me any info. When I told them that was impossible because he was–well–dead I was told that didn’t matter they had to have his signature. Weird.
OMG. Perfect!
But soooo frustrating…
Egads..don’t get me started. I had an electric company billing me the day after they had written all the accounts were closed and that the last bill was a fraudulent bill. Still they keep churning it out. Too bad the paper doesn’t have blank spots on it, I could have used it for spare note paper!
Just be sure to let them know where you plan to be buried so they can forward your mail (see the comment about the company that wanted a signature from a dead person!).
I think I’ll let them be ghost hunters!
Hit the ball out of the ballpark, girlfriend! This started me recalling all the times I had something like this happen, but this one represents one way of dealing with upstarts.
I made a call about a fee that had been attached to a credit card. The call, after waiting long enough for me to clean my house, was finally taken by someone who could not understand me and I could not understand them, no matter how I said it, no matter how I worded it. The person on the other end of the line kept repeating jiberish back to me. So I asked to have the call “escalated” to a manager. The manager took all my info, told me they would have the fee removed, thanked me, and all was well–not.
As if I were being punished for “escalating” the call, there was no change on my next bill and I had to repeat the process, only this time I asked for an American manager or I would switch credit cards.
I was punished. They make the mistake, you call them on it, and then you’re punished.
If I find any company with good customer service, I stick with them.
Thanks, Barb. Naturally, these are micro examples of the macro problem and issues.
Can we repost?
LOL at Patricia’s example.
Sure–repost the hell out of it! I’m sure there’s a book idea somewhere in here, and no shortage of material–then we would have something to read and laugh about while we’re on hold.
I shared it on FB and Twitter. Will link to it next blog.
Okey dokey–thanks. Those are worlds where I never venture!
I’ve joined the Smart Phone world, since it was cheaper than getting a land line into my new office. Best thing on the phone–an app called Fast Customer. I click the company I need to talk to and then go back to work. The app waits in the eternal queues and eventually my phone rings, with a decision-level exec asking how she/he can help me. It’s beautiful.
Wow–maybe I need one of those. I’ve been resisting the extra $30/month and the jeopardies of pocket-dialing.
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I’m with you there, Barbara. Call centres are just a smokescreen to keep you away from the people who are making the decisions.
Well said!
Ah, phone calls, I hate them and try to avoid them like the plague. I have no patience for bad music, multiple options that have nothing to do with why I’m calling and people who seem to have a poor grasp of language and what their company does.
They do, unintentionally, foster independence, resilience, determination and grit–either because we learn to persist and endure, or because we give up and figure out how to fix the damn thing ourselves.