A few hours ago, I was working at my computer which entails being online and suddenly, I had no internet connection. My first thought was that the modem needed to be rebooted so I did that but still couldn’t connect. Then I tried disconnecting the modem from the computer, turning everything off, reconnecting everything and turning all back on. Still nothing.
Finally, I was forced to call my provider, something I dread for many reasons.
It starts as soon as the provider answers the phone. “Welcome to…….” and goes downhill from there. A pleasant, somewhat mechanical, recorded female voice asks me to indicate my language of choice. Then the voice proceeds to give me a variety of initial options. Once I have determined my option and it is always the last one the voice mentions, I press a number on the touchtone key pad of my phone. This brings up an entirely new set of options and after about five minutes of this, I am finally told that I’m being connected to a customer service technician only to immediately hear this.
“All of our customer service technicians are currently helping other customers. Please stay on the line and your call will be answered in the order in which it was received.”
To make my time waiting for them to provide me with service, my provider plays a random selection of elevator music that would be an embarrassment even for Muzak. Every sixty seconds (I timed it because I had nothing else to do while I waited) a voice would interrupt the music to remind me to “Please stay on the line to maintain your calling priority.” The use of the word priority in this circumstance is pretty much an oxymoron.
Fifteen minutes later, I was finally connected to a real person and while I was rapidly losing my sense of humour (as difficult as you might find that to believe), I calmed down because I was finally connected with someone who was going to solve my problem and make all my wishes come true.
Wrong!
Wrong!
Her name was Moyna and she was half way around the world in Mumbai. Personally, I don’t care where my provider puts its customer service call centre even though their head office is about twenty minutes from where I live. If they want to set up their service centre some ten thousand miles from here, no problem. Just fix my bloody connection.
It became evident immediately after Moyna and I had exchanged initial pleasantries that we had an accent problem. I could barely understand her English because of her soft voice and thick accent and she didn’t understand mine all that well either (no doubt because I was muttering a lot under my breath). It reduced us to repeating every thing two and three times and to spelling out almost every command that Moyna had me enter into the modem software on my computer.
Moyna was unbearably patient while she told me to do various things. The tone and inflection of her voice never changed and increasingly sounded more and more like the recorded voice that had first walked me through the initial phone menu. Nonetheless we persevered and after Moyna and I spelled out the latest data entry back and forth, I eventually would get it entered only to have the modem fail to respond. Every now and then, she would politely excuse herself for a couple of minutes on the pretext that she had to check on something. Personally I think she was going for a cigarette but I can’t be sure. She would switch on the elevator music and disappear for a bit.
When she returned, Moyna would thank me for waiting and then we would begin an entirely new set of procedures which involved even more spelling and brought even more frustration to us both. Neither of us were particularly good spellers as it turns out.
I began to believe that Moyna kept disappearing and leaving me with the music as her way of coping with her frustration. It caused me to think that after dealing with so many of us, she probably believes most North Americans are idiots and was cursing her life for having to deal with us night after night, or in her case, day after day.
For my part, I had already taken Moyna off my Christmas card list.
After many absences and many failed attempts, Moyna excused herself one last time. She was gone for quite a bit and I began to think either she was considering terminating our relationship or had simply gone for lunch. But she came back and announced with some satisfaction that she had tracked down the problem.
The provider’s network was down in my area, for which she apparently felt personally responsible and apologised, but they had people working on it, she reassured me, and they hoped to have service restored shortly.
I can’t even begin to express how I felt at that moment. Telling me that the service was down after a twenty-five minute wait to speak to a human being and forty minutes of back and forth with Moyna was like telling me that that the reason the television wasn’t working after waiting all day for the repairman to show up was due to a power failure in the neighbourhood.
It's unbelievable!
I had been on the phone for an hour including almost forty minutes with my pal Moyna and she only thought to check to make sure that there was no interruption of service after exhausting her technical expertise.
How can a service department not know about service disruptions in advance? We live in the age of instant information. Everything is connected. Surely to God, when she typed my account number into her computer, there should have been some kind of flag that service was disrupted in that area or at the very least an email sent around to the techs advising them of where service was down. Remember, this is an Internet provider, not a shoe manufacturer. Shouldn't they be the most capable of knowing when their service is in trouble?
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The state of customer service today is enough to make your head explode! |
How can a service department not know about service disruptions in advance? We live in the age of instant information. Everything is connected. Surely to God, when she typed my account number into her computer, there should have been some kind of flag that service was disrupted in that area or at the very least an email sent around to the techs advising them of where service was down. Remember, this is an Internet provider, not a shoe manufacturer. Shouldn't they be the most capable of knowing when their service is in trouble?
I wasted an hour and my provider wasted an hour and whatever the associated cost was of that call and Moyna’s time for nothing. But that is the state of things today. For all the automations, for the billions of dollars spent on technology and employees, there is no real service anymore and I’ve finally figured out why. Nobody is paid to think so nobody does.
Still, after another hour, the crack field team back here in the homeland got the network back up and running and I was back online. I logged on, wrote my column and was in the middle of saving it when…..the network went off line again.
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