Noble creatures
*ring ring*
OPERATOR: Thank you for calling about your [Business which theoretically should not be offering credit cards] credit card, may I have your acceptance number please?
AUGUSTE: No, I’m just calling because I received your solicitation envelope already open, and I just want to make sure that no one fraudulently tried to apply for this card in my name.
OPERATOR: Okay.
…
…
AUGUSTE: So…you still want that number, I guess?
OPERATOR: Yes.
AUGUSTE: [Says number].
OPERATOR: Okay, that was [number]. [clearly speaking for a recorder, now] Are you the person whose name appears on the solicitation?
AUGUSTE: Yes.
OPERATOR: Were you mumble mumble?
AUGUSTE: Ye - I’m sorry, what?
OPERATOR: You are calling to apply for this card, correct?
AUGUSTE: No! I’m calling to make sure no one ELSE applied for this already, because that would have been identity theft!
OPERATOR: Okay, I can’t help you with that, sir, you need to call this number: [Number].
AUGUSTE: Okay.
[Dials new number]
RECORDED VOICE: Thank you for calling cardmember services. To apply for a card, press 1. To check on the status of a card application, press 2. For problems with applying on our web site, press 3.
AUGUSTE: [Waits for option which does not involve beginning the process of applying for a card.]
RECORDED VOICE: Thank you for calling cardmember services. To apply for a card, press 1. To che-
AUGUSTE: [Presses 0]
RECORDED VOICE: Thank you. Goodbye. [Click]
AUGUSTE: [Dials number again]
RECORDED VOICE: Th-
AUGUSTE: [Presses 3.]
RECORDED VOICE: Thank you for calling cardmember services. We are now closed. Please call back Monday through Friday betw-
AUGUSTE: [Throws phone.]
To be continued when I get ahold of someone in cardmember services, or when I receive thirteen Mastercards and a fruit-of the-month club subscription in the mail.
78 Responses to “Pressing 1 for English? Least of my worries”
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I love how all these fucking companies make it impossible to talk to a human being. But hey, let’s just let the market decide. If a company that has real humans on the other end comes into the market, we can all jump over to them. But wait, the competitive pressures of the market would work against hiring people, because dead labor (machines) is cheaper than live people…
Again, the invisible hand has its middle finger raised.
because dead labor (machines) is cheaper than live people…
Yep. a key internal metric of “success” of an IVR system is minimizing the number of times that a caller actually speaks with a human. This contributes to “organizational effectiveness”.
Which is why there are places like gethuman.com.
Of course, queries like Auguste’s were not dreamt of in their business plan, so clearly the problen is on Auguste’s end. Do we not all seek maximum transactional efficiency?
War is Peace!
Ignorance is Strength!
Freedom is Slavery!
Inefficiency is Death!
Only if we accept that homo sapiens is homo economicus and nothing else. And, well, I refuse to accept that.
That gethuman.com list is so…beautiful. I think I shed a tear.
Only if we accept that homo sapiens is homo economicus and nothing else.
Of course not! There is also homo exploitus, homo despoilus, homo fatuous, homo dickus cheneyus, homo…
Sorry, having a low species-image day.
i’m on unemployment right now, and this is one of my pet peeves with that, too. anytime i call and have a question that doesn’t amount to something easily looked up on the website, i’m basically screwed. even after figuring out the exact dialing sequence to get a human, i’m still only actually connected with someone about a third of the time, because the other two attempts i’m told that they’re handing an unusually high volume of calls, and that i should please call back at another time. and half the time i actually get a human, the employee on the line is either so rude that i can’t get any information besides “worthless scum!” (Christ, this is MY MONEY THAT I EARNED that you’re giving me, not taxpayer dollars!), or can’t answer my question, gives me incomplete info, tells me everythings taken care of when it isn’t, etc. thus necessitating another call.
which is yet another reason i’m 99.9998% sure that there is no such thing as a welfare queen — i would almost rather go work at Wendy’s than slog through the system day in, day out. and again, this is for my own money that i earned fair and square, not a taxpayer handout. god only knows what it must be like when you’re actually trying to get real government aid.
Call one of the three credit tracking companies like Equifax or whatever it is and put a fraud check on your account. I had to do it twice (twice!) when laptops of school administrators that had my SSN on them got stolen. It gives you six months of requiring them to call you and double check before opening any new accounts in your name.
My new favorite credit card company story happened to me on Friday — they called to tell me that my boss’ corporate Visa was in arrears and the operator got very snippy with me when I started to look things up while she was still on the phone. I think at one point I said, “You know, you called me, so it’s not really my problem if this is taking up too much of your time.”
And then, of course, she couldn’t even tell me WHY she was showing my boss’ account as $9,000 and said I had to talk to my own corporate accounting department, which told me that she was full of shit. (More politely, of course.)
Finally, an upside to having bad credit!
Two worst experiences ever:
Student Loan - they cashed a check but did not apply it to my balance. Even after I sent a letter (not email, but a real letter) and a copy of the cashed check, they were less than helpful.
I got them to pay attention when I began to list the names, dates, and exchanges from each previous call at the beginning of a new one.
Credit Bureau:
Trying to get them to remove a false account that I had never opened (at least the balance was zero). It took a long time. Credit bureaus are a crime against humanity. I never even gave them permission to collect data about me. Why should I beg to get them to change it, when it’s wrong? Has anyone ever successfully sued them for … anything?
I used to get a ton of those applications every week. I called a couple of companies and told them to stop, but it didn’t help. Then I signed up for a card saying my occupation was, “Bum’ and my yearly income was $1.69.
The applications stopped coming.
My old law partner would get calls from collection agencies on funds supposedly owing on his student loan. He would tell them, politely, that his records indicated full payment of all amounts, and that is was possible that their records failed to reflect a payment actually made. “However.” he would say, “it’s possible that the fault is on my end and that there was a payment due which I missed. If you can send me the record of which payments you say were missed, and check them against my records. If I’m wrong, I’ll promptly send the missing amounts including interest penalties. If you’re wrong I will send you the proof of payments for the period(s) in question.”
For some reason, this INFURIATED the collection agents, who launched into preprinted scripts about “paying what you owe!”. This would get them nowhere, and a few months later, a new collection agency would be aboard trying the same script with the same result. Given that neither the collectors nor those who originally held the student loan actually provided any documentation, I can only wonder at how many people (who aren’t criminal lawyers who love driving people insane with politeness and honesty!) just paid up to end the harassment, even though they were in the right.
If gethuman doesn’t help you, try making sounds the machine doesn’t recognize — I like the Greek alphabet, or a page of some book — until it offers to connect you with a human.
“god only knows what it must be like when you’re actually trying to get real government aid.”
its a hell you only go through because you have absolutely no other feasible option before you at that time, believe me.
In general, aren’t these computerized programs a market success for customer and business? 90% or more of the calls to customer care are for basic information a computer can answer. The other 10% should be routed to humans, but the program will try hard to make sure you need to talk to one first, otherwise everyone dials up and presses ‘0′ for operator.
I know it is a pain in the ass, but 90% of the time you get your answer faster than if you had to wait for a human to answer, and the overall costs are lower (which hopefully is reflected in your price, otherwise, switch to the competition).
One additional bonus is a computer won’t give you bad service because it is in a bad mood, or doesn’t like the sound of your voice, or the part of the country you are from, or any other reason. A computer treats all customers equally, although from this experience it seems it treats them all equally shitty. Its too bad we can’t have GOOD automatic service…
But getting to a human only rarely gets you anywhere either. I feel sorry for the poor schlubs who are getting paid on the basis of how quickly they clear calls, but every now and then I take wicked pleasure in knowing that whatever the company thought they were saving by installing voice menus in front of badly scripted customer-service droids who have no authority to actually fix anything has just been lost by the time I’m willing to spend using up the time of a paid human.
Only if we accept that homo sapiens is homo economicus and nothing else. And, well, I refuse to accept that.
I live in a country where a political party with representation in Parliament calls itself “The Association of Consumers and Taxpayers”.
Spot the problem with this title…
I’m dealing with all the crap that comes with being an only child of a recently deceased father who had a charming(!) meth addict for a “caretaker,” and the meth addict’s crazy (probably crackhead) mom. Other than steal most of his stuff, attempted theft of his tv, computer, and truck, they did manage to steal his bankcard and open up credit in his name.
It’s not just the IVRS - it’s the humans on the other end. I tried to report the bankcard theft to WaMu over the phone to no avail and had to drive 45 minutes to the nearest branch that could “help” me. Once there it took over twenty minutes of repeated explanations to the CSR at the bank that the dead dude could NOT have used his debit AFTER his death to purchase gas and groceries. She really didn’t understand. She also demanded that I pay to bring the account to a zero balance before they would put a fraud alert and close the account. That took twenty more minutes of “Hell No.” Finally the manager re-explained it all to her again. This is not rocket science, dead dudes don’t buy stuff 3 days after their bodies are found. (Unless this is a horror movie)
If I hear one more time while on hold with ANY of these companies that I can find all the help on their website I’m going to scream. I called because I need to speak with a human, not because I like staying on hold for 4 hours.
There’s only one?
Regarding the original problem, PrivacyGuard offers a service where they alert you whenever credit is applied for in your name. A bit pricy, possibly,* but they also let you get free credit reports whenever you damn well please. Might be useful.
*at a specific price that reminds me of the first thing my credit card company did when I activated the card:
Them: “And we are offering a wallet theft protection plan which (*goes into a description of what it does, mentioning nothing about the price*), please say ‘I accept’ to continue.”
Me, happily having paid attention: “What?”
Them: “Please say ‘I accept’ to activate Wallet Protection Program.”
Me: “Wait, how much is this?”
Them: “It is available for the low price of only $12.95 per month, I need you to say “I accept” so we can get it on record that you have applied for this service.
Me: “Not interested.”
Them: “Are you aware that (*repeats description of what it does*)
Me: “I can cancel my own stuff, thank you.”
On the other end of the spectrum, I am very pleased with Bank of America, because their calling-person actually ended the call after I told her I didn’t care to give out information over the phone.
Anybody else read Laura Penny’s brilliant book, Your Call Is Important To Us: The Truth About Bullshit ?
Her response: “If my call is so important to you, why isn’t anyone answering the damn phone?”
Given that neither the collectors nor those who originally held the student loan actually provided any documentation, I can only wonder at how many people (who aren’t criminal lawyers who love driving people insane with politeness and honesty!) just paid up to end the harassment, even though they were in the right.
Similar thing happened to me — I started getting calls from a collection agency about a credit card I’d paid off 15 years ago. I told them the same thing — provide me with documentation that the debt exists, and I’ll be happy to pay. Until then, tough luck.
It turned out that the calls were coming from a bottom-feeding “collection agency” that survives by convincing people they owe money when they really don’t. I can’t remember its name, but I think Atrios had a post about them.
I just finished Penny’s book. What a glorious, intensely sustained rant.
Whatever you’ve heard about identity theft as a problem?
Um… it’s worse. MUCH worse. I see stuff that would curl your hair.
Here’s a few things that you can do right now as minimal protection:
*Don’t mail from home, don’t have your mail delivered to your home. Typical gangbanger scam is to pay drunks or homeless cash per bagful of stolen mail. Get a PO Box. Yesterday should be soon enough.
*Don’t give out your SSN… EVER. Too many businesses, ie doctor’s offices, want to use your SSN as an ID number. At most, they can ask for no more than the last 4 digits.
*Don’t carry your SocSec card in your wallet/purse. My own mother was a victim of identity theft when she put her purse in the car trunk not realizing she was being watched … in the time it took to play a round of golf the thieves had racked up a couple thousand dollars of electronic purchases at several stores … and tried even after flags were on her credit report to open new credit in her name
*Make sure if you use a credit card at a restaurant that your full number is NOT on the receipt …. if you leave it on the table, it might not be the waiter who picks it up… or even a waiter might be tempted to pocket the information.
*Indeed, be alert anytime you hand over a credit card…watch the cashier to make sure they aren’t double swiping the card (some thieves get retail jobs, or have inside people who place mag readers under the counter to steal information)
*Check your soc security report to make sure no one is working under your name. Don’t wait until the IRS starts sending you demands for back taxes and penalties for a job you never had.
*ditto getting your annual free credit report and making sure everything on it belongs to you
If you do suspect ID theft…report it to the police right away. Learn who the detective is assigned to such reports, learn the local dep. district attorney is assigned to the ID Theft special unit. Then talk to them often and follow up with their progress. Armed with the police report will help you in the really awful cleanup you’ll have to do with the credit card reporting agencies, social security (you canNOT ever get a new number) and the IRS.
“Spot the problem with this title…”
There’s only one?
This is a political party that attempts to have an influence on teh governance of the nation.
It sees Kiwis as “consumers and taxpayers”. The idea of, oh, “citizens” seems to escape them, both in the title and in their policies.
Heh, nice to know other people are having trouble with WaMu; My sister had her purse stolen, and the thief took money out of the ATM. They refunded the money, then decided it wasn’t legit and took the money back (which made her overdrawn.) She’s been on the phone about 8 different times, they keep giving her the runaround on the rare occasions that she gets a real person. The newest indignity? They sent her a letter saying they got the thief’s picture from the ATM camera, and they want her to come in and identify it…in BROOKLYN. Oh, while we happen to be living in CHICAGO. It’s so obvious that WaMu is just putting up obstacles to avoid having to refund the money. *sigh*
I’ve actually almost never had a problem talking to an actual human. My complaint is that the automated system makes me type in all my account info and go through dozens of menus specifying what my problem is, but when I finally do get sent through to a person they just ask me all that info again.
I don’t agree that 90 percent of calls are for simple information and that ninety percent of the time the consumer is satisfied to get that information by computer. At this point many people have computers and can look up basic, standard information online without calling an 800 number. the only reason you call an 800 number or a corporate headquarters number or a national number is that you need information or help that was *not readily available* or a service that can only be provided at a higher level.
And, au contraire, when I call my local bank to find out whether they have a notary public available and at what hours I don’t want to be bounced automatically to the national level to apply for a credit card, I want to speak to someone at my actual local bank.
and I agree with stentor, the number of itmes you are forced to enter or discuss private information before being bounced to a person who asks for it all over again is nuts.
Also, why has no one mentioned how frustrating it is to finally get to a human being, start to handle your problem, and then have them veer off into trying to sell you new services which your call to them just demonstrated they are constituionally incapable of fulfilling without pissing youoff?
aimai
All good advice, Darleen. The only problem with is not the wisdom of the advice but the police at the other end. One of the biggest, biggest, biggest problems with N. American police forces is that they are blue collar in their recruiting, promotion, outlook and emphasis on what they think is important. This is not a knock on blue collar, it’s a knock on having a limited outlook. Tough-to-solve, nuanced, sophisticated crimes such as identity theft are not given anywhere the resources that they need. Worse, they are not seen as important compared to, say, radar traps. One of the things that used to drive me 24-karat batshit insane when practicing civil law was the fact that police forces tend to define much white collar crime as being a matter for the civil courts. Caregiver walks out the door with ten fifties from grandma’s purse? They’re interested. Your regular wholesale supplier pulls a scam on you and walks away with $50k of your money? Sue him, is their reply.
They are interested in credit card fraud, though, which may reflect two things: First, that the problem is now so pervasive they can’t avoid it. Second, credit card companies and banks have the weight to lean on the command and political levels to ensure that it is important.
Another problem that I saw was that police forces tend to promote to upper command levels almost exclusively from two streams: the political / managerial, and the high-profile homicide. At least with the latter they think that solving crimes is important; the only question is which crimes. The former are all about the structure, the funding, the budgets, the image, the comfy chairs and personal opportunities. The famed RCMP here has just gone through a number of scandals, many of which are related to this very problem. For the first time in over a hundred years their commissioner has to be from the outside, and a civilian to boot.
Part of the solution may be permitting lateral entry like the military and European police forces. People thus come to the command level with the mind-opening benefits of higher education, and are not compelled to spend fifteen years doing grunt work and being wholly warped by the system before they are let anywhere near a command or managerial decision.
You want to know why no one is answering the phone? Gee, it might be because when you DO get a human, you abuse them, yell at them, insult them, demand things they’ve already told you can’t be done, and then abuse them some more. This while they’re working insanely completely random shifts picked through a lottery system in order to make sure there’s someone there 24/7 in case you have a soap opera watching crisis at 2 AM and making starvation wages unless they happen to get incredibly lucky and have a union.
It is my strong opinion that everyone should be forced to work in customer service for at least a year. Then you would know what it’s LIKE.
Done it–phone, retail and hospitality.
AFOR, I personally always try to be polite and civil to the folks who I am able to reach for customer service. I know that They =! The Company and are in fact just the poorly-paid grunts who have to put up with the fallout of The Company’s stingy policies. Besides, usually I’m relying on them to do something for me, and it’s rarely helpful to tick off somebody who you need to do something for you.
But let’s face it, there are CS types who get obnoxious themselves, the most common being The Rep Who Won’t Take A (clear, unambiguous and politely repeated) “No” For An Answer, and The Rep Who Insists On Trying To Fit Your Square Peg Problem Into The Round Hole Solution Because S/He Isn’t Listening To You. With them, I do occasionally get a little, uh, droll.
Really? When I call UPS (to reschedule a delivery, usually) or my bank (to order special information faxed, see below, or to report my card lost), it’s solely to get information that I couldn’t get online. To say the least, that ninety-percent figure that you pulled from thin air hasn’t reflected my experience. Now, UPS will let you talk to a human after only two button-presses, and my bank will let you sign in via touchtone and then forward you to a human, for whom I’ve never had to wait more than five minutes, and the majority of the time I haven’t had to wait at all. And yet somehow these businesses manage to stay afloat.
I suppose I should mention that my bank is Wachovia; I’ve had an account with them since I started college (they were First Union at the time), and they’ve invariably been helpful. I sent in my first credit card application to them, and it came back denied because I had no credit history; I called, and they agreed to set me up with a card. When I opened a second account, they asked if I wanted checks; the checks arrived in the mail, and I got charged fifteen bucks for them. Since I almost never use checks, I explained on the phone that I didn’t really have fifteen bucks of want for them, and that no one had told me I was buying checks. The representative refunded the fifteen bucks and didn’t ask for the checks back. I haven’t had any of the various nightmare scenarios that folks have outlined in this thread, but my normal dealings with them have been excellent. (And, I might add, that ten percent of situations that Grilltacular mentions make all the difference.)
I’ve had considerably less luck with Cingular Wireless, now AT&T Wireless. My father had previously provided a cell phone to me, and had told me just how impossible it was to dispute anything with their representatives, as they would just tell him that he didn’t “understand proration”. (”You just don’t understand proration” has now become a catchphrase in my family, repeated when someone has gotten screwed over by customer service.) He asked me to throw some money toward the bill, as I’d used a ton of minutes. I sent them a check through my online billpay system, and waited about a week and a half, noticing that the service had been cut off and not restored.
They had, they tell me, received the check in that they’d cashed it and were playing football with bricks of my money, but they hadn’t received it in that they hadn’t credited it to my account. I explained that I had check numbers, billpay confirmation numbers, all sorts of things, but they told me that they “don’t accept web printouts”. I called my bank and got an interim statement faxed to me, then spent twenty minutes magic markering out everything but the payment to the cell phone people, faxed it to them… and they said they’ll look into it. I don’t understand what that’s supposed to help, since it just contains the information I told them in the first place.
So, yeah, they cashed my check a week ago (according to my bank), but they’re pretending that they didn’t. Fascinating waste of my time. Oddly enough, the incompetent company is the one with the ten-minute wait on the customer support line. I wonder if there’s a correlation there; I wonder if there’s a ten-minute wait to speak to a sales rep.
Auguste and everyone else —
You can opt out of pre-approved credit offers at OptOutPrescreen.
Here is info from the FTC about opting out, which contains a link to OptOutPrescreen, which is enough to convince me that it’s not an ID theft scam: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/credit/prescreen.shtm
Not only does it reduce your risks of ID theft, but it also reduces the forests that die for junk mail every day. I finally did opt-out this year and God, it’s nice not to have to sort through five credit card offers every day.
when my wallet was stolen a few years back, i got all the credit cards, ATM, checking account cancelled right away. no problems there. a week or 2 later, i started getting calls and notices from BLOCKBUSTER VIDEO stores about overdue rentals. it was incredibly hard to get that straightened out. the thief went to a bunch of different stores, got bunches of videos and games at each, and presumably re-sold them. blockbuster didn’t block my card on the central system for a long time, and i ended up talking with managers at store after store. a couple of the bad charges ended up in collection. the problem wasn’t finding someone to talk with — it was that they kept promising to get my card blocked, and it wasn’t happening.
anon, i also have done a lot of customer service type jobs, and it does stink when people behave like barbarians. if i’m feeling particularly frustrated trying to get a problem fixed, i always tell the person on the other end that i know they are just doing their job and i’m not upset with them, i just want it fixed — and then i ask for a supervisor. i think a LOT of companies really do not do a good job of anticipating problems that might come up, and having the means available to fix them — it isn’t a solution to staff phone lines with folks who have limited information and no authority, and not provide them with ways to get customers to the people who can fix the problems. that’s unfair to the customers and the employees, both.
It is my strong opinion that everyone should be forced to work in customer service for at least a year. Then you would know what it’s LIKE.
I have. Two years at a company that sold computers through its catalog in customer service only, not sales.
That doesn’t mean I’m going to be automatically sympathetic when I have to call Cingular back for the third time to find out why the first two people who said they were going to set up automatic bill pay didn’t bother to do it and now the payment is late.
oh, ballgame — yes about the pushy reps. i harbor particular, uh, drollness for the extra-perky ones who insist on calling me by my formal first name [as if we are old pals], then treat me as if i’m a particularly stupid member of the species for not buying what they are selling. is there something confusing or rude about “thanks, but i’m not interested”? i try to be polite, but the few who continue badgering me past that point [by then they are yelling with friendly concern for my mental health] are told “no, goodbye,” and i hang up.
blucas! Jul 7th, 2007 at 8:00 pm
Finally, an upside to having bad credit!
Not so much, if the upside is no aggressive credit marketing. I used to get a couple of credit card apps in the mail every month. Then after I had several late payments for medical bills, 2 of which ended up in collection, my credit went down the tubes. Now, I get 2 or 3 credit card apps in the mail every day. I think that they WANT high-risk borrowers whom they can charge higher interest rates and fees.
Grendelkahn - “You just don’t understand proration.” - Wow, I’ve heard that before. From T-Mobile and National City when my husband’s wallet and cell were stolen! Yeah, I don’t understand why you want me paying for $500 of game charges to a phone not in my possession; I’ll pay for my calls but not for the thief’s gaming habit. The only solution to that was my husband’s never ending politeness and patience. Even though we (and especially my husband) were always polite, we were informed by T-Mobile that we were “harassing” them by calling more than once a week and that we were not allowed to contact T-Mobile for any reason via phone. All of our contact would be required to be done via fax. Eventually (12 months, 3 states’ attorneys, and numerous complaints later) all was resolved.
I did customer service for a long time and a key element is just listening. When the CSR doesn’t listen or pay attention to what they are doing it is agony for the customer and makes the experience painful. When they listen and use their brains, the experience is much easier for everyone. One of the credit cards I called on for my dad was opened after he died and I didn’t even have a card (surprise, surprise). The CSR was polite, patient and quick - he promptly figured out that people dead for >3 days do not open credit. I never even told him that the wallet was stolen, I just asked for the date the account was opened after I told him the date the body was found.
CS is not an easy job by any means, the pay sucks, the turnover is high, and the training is ineffectual. My best job in CS I wasn’t trained for - I was the summer temp. I trained myself and did the work no one else wanted to do and talked to the really pissed big deal customers until they were happy. I have proof you received your big yellow truck, VIN# blahbalbhblah. What you did with your big yellow truck once it was signed for and on your property is none of my business, I suggest you have all your big yellow trucks check in for a maintenance check to find which department took the big yellow truck that didn’t belong to them. Of course, I used polite words when saying this to them. I reserve my irritation for talking to my mother.
More companies need to have people dedicated to resolving problems, not just doing the intake and need to empower the CSRs to help resolve the problems. Press 1 for more options.
The, tHe, thE, THe, tHE, ThE, THE, the!
Teh makes me revolt against cyber-cool
@grendelkhan
That is a very narrow worldview. Everyone has a telephone - not everyone has easy access to a computer or to the internet. And if they do - use of the internet and computers in general require a higher learner curve that make it harder to find information. Especially for the elderly who, as a group, are the lowest percentage computer owners.
IVR systems do accomplish their goals in which they provide the majority of people with the information they need without having to resort to an (expensive) human being. Just because they don’t work for you do not mean that IVR systems are a failure.
That doesn’t mean I’m going to be automatically sympathetic when I have to call Cingular back for the third time to find out why the first two people who said they were going to set up automatic bill pay didn’t bother to do it and now the payment is late.
“I need to speak to your supervisor. This is not a matter on which you can help.” Rinse. Repeat.
You don’t need to chew out the grunt who picks up the phone. Flush out the people who are paid enough to do something for you.
I work at a government office, and I end up doing a lot of CS over the phone. It is rather frustrating because I KNOW that the information that a lot of them are seeking is on the voicemail system, but they just hit zero for the operator because they “want to talk to a person”. I end up just reciting the message on the voice mail that deals with their problem. After you do this ten or fifteen times in a row, it gets very frustrating.
I’ve counted the amount of time I have spent answering calls like that. Those little two or three minute phone calls add up fast. Spending four to five hours a week just repeating the same three phrases over and over again does not seem to be an effective use of my time.
A slightly different pet peeve — I hate computers that make you talk to them. I feel like an ass sitting at work going, “Representative!”
Hint if you call FedEx: the order that they give you the options in is the order that the options are numbered. So the first one they say corresponds to 1, etc. So I can just press the buttons and not have my co-workers go, “What? Did you say something?”
“I need to speak to your supervisor. This is not a matter on which you can help.� Rinse. Repeat.
I have been refused a supervisor.
Really.
But, then, Cingular customer service is by far the worst I’ve ever run into. The only people there who actually know what they’re doing and can do something for you on their own are the collections agents, as I discovered when we were incorrectly sent a disconnect notice.
six-oh-seven-nine
Agreed. Although, I would posit it is more a political will problem then just at the agency level. No matter how an agency may want to allocate their resources, they feel the real and immediate heat from the county Board of Supervisors. Sometimes their local city council. For instance, if the suits don’t want the image of the city besmirched by bad publicity concerning gangs, then they’ll put pressure on the local pd not to have any special gang unit and to categorize gang crimes as mere vandalism, shoplifting, burglary, etc.Sometimes it takes a suit or a police department higher up to be a victim of id theft to get some pressure to start specific units. Sometimes police are actually targeted for id theft as a tactic of revenge or intimidation.
Fortunately, the pervasiveness of this crime (and once info is stolen it is ridiculously easy to counterfeit a new credit card) has caught the attention of many locales and there are resources, from detective units to prosecutorial units, being allocated.
Still, the best advice is to try and let the average citizen know the basic steps to avoid having their id stolen.
” And if they do - use of the internet and computers in general require a higher learner curve that make it harder to find information.”
Then why do said recording systems berate me every time I make another menu selection that x, y, and/or z information is available much more efficiently via their website?
Do they really think there are people out there who’ve just never heard of the web, didn’t know their bank/whatever had a website, etc? And if so, then why also the excuse that they have to have the crazy baroque phone system because a lot of people don’t have web access or skillz?
Also, I will say that if the computerized system actually worked, I would be far less pissy about them.
oh heck, I forgot one other very important bit of advice concerning id theft that should have been on my list above
*Don’t throw any paperwork with any indentifying information into your trash.
Dumpster diving provides a goldmine of information for id thieves. There have been cases where thieves have gotten reams of personal info from business and court** dumpsters because employees just weren’t thinking and tossed computer printouts into the trash instead of the burn barrel. This applies to one’s personal trash, too, because once you put it out on the curb for pickup, it is no longer yours.
Either get a small personal shredder or save it up in a box until you have enough to have a shredding business pick it up.
(**a couple years ago CA passed privacy laws concerning personal identifying information contained in public court records. Some id thieves were merely sitting in courthouses copying witness/victim information from police reports — names, date of birth, address, and sometimes SSNs. All police reports that are now in the court case jacket have such personal info on witnesses and victims redacted.)
The worst customer service I’ve seen — recently — was with DirecTV. Never got the service that they said they were giving (after a year), because the moron who came to set up the satellite dishes aimed one of them directly into a tree. (Which may have been his only option, but still, he should have told us that this might be a problem and asked if we wanted to continue, or suggest a new spot for the dish.) We were locked into a year of service, and when the tree shed leaves in the winter, things were okay, but then the leaves came back and we lost all our local stations intermittently from about April on. We called about the tree business a time or two and were always either told that nothing could be done, or that they would have to charge us for a service call to send someone out to look at it and determine whether something could be done. Uh-uh. This was your fuck-up. We’re not paying for it again.
When we then cancelled service about a week ago, DirecTV said our service had started on a date other than when it actually did, left my husband on hold for thirty minutes at a time more than once, hung up on him, etc.
They have since started to call once a day to ask us why we cancelled our service. They were told this when we were actually doing the cancelling, so it’s hard not to read this as them just wanting to harrass us for leaving.
I do like the photo; it goes along beautifully!
Charlie and I went through bankruptcy years ago; had to save UP to do it! (go figure, huh?) Years pass, then as soon as it hit the 7 yr plus one WEEK anniversary of the bankruptcy, we started to get extremely threatening letters from this collection agency we had never heard of, about a phone bill our TENANT had stuck us with 8 years before!
So we had to go back through our paperwork, find the case number and call the company with the info to essentially wave our “get out of jail free card” and tell them to stick their head in a pig.
From now on, I have the case number and info where I can readily access it- OH WAS I PISSED!!!
Since calls are routed in through a main line and the person answering the phone usually doesn’t know who you are… that doesn’t even make any sense. It’s like you are saying that these people inherently know you are going to be rude and so are rude themselves from the beginning.
Having worked in service for 13 years (retail and fast-food), I wholeheartedly agree. However, when your bank sends your student loan into collections after they themselves agree to give you interest relief and send you a letter stating as much, and then this happens TWO MORE TIMES (6 months and again one year later), and it takes two years of calling to finally get the black marks off your credit rating, you find yourself able to see both sides. You can hold more that one concept inside your brain at once, you know.
But thanks for your concern.
Maybe you’re right, but that is dependent on the degree of control that the political types have over operational decisions. As noted, the RCMP got waaaaaaaaaaay too used to hiding its stupidities behind the veneers of its over-rated reputation and independence. An even better example was in Toronto, with a notoriously politician-contemptuous police service. (It was recently revealed that they launched a bogus investigation into the close friend of a Police Board Chair some time back, simply because she was the first one not to get down and kiss their collective asses. That will give you some idea of the mentality.) There in T.O., bike thefts rose to the point where we were having more bikes stolen than much bigger American cities like L.A. and Miami, where people ride bikes all year round. All efforts to get them to establish a dedicated bike theft unit were met with a truculent “you can’t tell ME what to do!” refusals that would have done credit to a particularly rebellious fourteen year old.
A police force commanded largely by guys who made their professional bones bulked out in body armour dealing with druggies on the one hand or oiling up to the right politicians on the other is not going to produce people who understand sophisticated nonviolent commercial crime. Devoting greater and greater resources to investigators who will never carry a gun goes against the macho “you’ve got to do your time on the STREET!” subculture which will never recognize that some of the most rapidly-spreading crime has about as much to the with Da Street as claw hammers have to do with fixing fine china. The brutal fact is that commercial crime requires a division of responsibility akin to that of Counter-Intelligence within the British system: large numbers of highly trained unarmed investigators who call in the Police when an arrest needs to be made. And this is where your political will comes in Darlene, I concede. Such an investigative force can be created by federal or provincial or municipal levels of government, but none of them have the wit to do so. (In defence of the municipal level: in Canada they are grossly underfunded by the other levels of governmen; and in Toronto the pols in waking terror of a stubborn and occasionally thuggish police union.)
That applies to Toronto’s commercial crime unit, as it applies to credit card fraud. The downside for me, when I was a litigator there, was that it pretty much filled their resources and mental horizons. We couldn’t get them to investigate any white collar crime other than credit card theft. Our firm had one case where a pissed-off FO in our client’s firm had transferred about $100k from account to account to account (etc.) until it ended up in his account, then he walked out the door. The cops wouldn’t even open a file, insisting that it was a “civil matter”.
Having badmouthed the police, I should say one thing in their defence: resources are sometimes allocated on the basis of which crimes are actually going to be punished. Judges tend to impose far lighter sentences for commercial crime, and after a while I think that the cops as a collective entity might just say, “bugger this for a lark” and move on to things the judges do take seriously. A close friend of mine, while a detective, had an embezzlement case go to trial. I can’t recall what the woman stole, but it was a substantial sum, of which only a tiny fragment was recovered. She showed up to her sentencing hearing wearing a big, expensive fur coat, for crissake, and still only got a few months in the pokey. The investigating officers and the Crowns (what you call ADAs) all agreed in the hall that they’d do that crime for that amount of time. As my colleague dryly remarked, “if the judge’s sentence can convince the cops and the crowns to do a crime the first chance they get, then he has probably failed in the `deterrence’ role of sentencing”.
What’s even worse is when the businesses you’re calling have no real reason to want to talk to you, which is often the case when you’re a trade journalist (or any other kind). When you get trapped in voice-mail hell, not only is it frustrating, but you can’t even legitimately complain.
I find it interesting the level of complexity these systems have from an engineering standpoint. By and far, they are working to make them better, but there are some companies that were early adopters which are reporting of “bringing back” more human operators, as well as the “insourcing” fad that seems to be replacing “outsourcing” because of customer complaints. That is locating the call centers to BFE US instead of BFE Earth.
Overall, I think the market is, generally speaking, trying to find the happy medium of efficiency and customer service pretty well. Some companies better than others albeit.
Have also noticed that companies seem to be, on the whole, better at giving your options to get off the line early and talk to a Real Live Human Being when you have something that really is outside the standard options. Gov’t and state agencies, not so much. I’ve been bounced so many times around Secretary of State of Illinois that my nickname should be Pinball. (If you’re lucky, after getting routed about 15 times, you get an actual phone that you can leave a message on. No one is ever available. Then you get to play phone tag for many days.)
This is why in certain circumstances it is easier to physically go to a location and make a very obvious statement of your presence until the problem is resolved. One of my friends did that finally to handle an IRS dispute (something that she had paid and they kept not crediting her for–showed up on the doorstep and just waited, stubbornly and politely, until the problem was fixed.
Again, the invisible hand has its middle finger raised.
Brilliant.
My voice hits pure tones sometimes when I’m talking normally. Many phone computer systems will, for instance, interpret a tone I hit while leaving a message to be a button pressed on my phone– and cut me off, possibly deleting the message, depending what pitch I hit and what the commands are.
I have to pitch my voice lower and husky-ish when I deal with phones connected to an automated system, even once I do get to a real person’s voice mail. For this and other reasons (one of which is having worked as the fallback person for people opting out of the automated system) I hate talking on the phone with a passion of a thousand suns.
Working i n customer service taught me to be nice to people working, not take them for granted. If I hear a customer berating a clerk for no good reason, I give them some assurance I think they are doing fine. If there’s a long wait at a counter, I give the cashier a smile and nod so she knows I’m not going to crab at her. But as much as I loathed being yelled at for things I had no control over in my old job, unlike Anonymous, I would never have left the phone unanswered or been rude to a customer. On the other hand, someone who was nice would be a lot more likely to be given exceptional service.
OK FYI, not only is opting out of pre-screened offers a good way to avoid identity theft, but it’s crucial to improving your credit rating.
Every time someone inquires about your account, the credit rating agencies ding you a point or two. Those points add up, and if your credit isn’t where you want it, those offers are going to keep you down.
They know it, and they will keep up the inquiries so you don’t get better offers. So get off the lists.
Especially since corporations are using credit reports for everything these days, including hiring.
As for collection agencies, even after a bankruptcy and after the credit card companies have ‘charged you off’, they will continue to sell that bad debt like a junk bond to collection agencies. Force the collection agencies to prove it every time, and check those reports annually to make sure that debts really do fall off, b/c even after 7 years, the collection agencies will buy the debt and try to make you pay them. And b/c they bought the debt at a later date, the credit reporting agencies will keep ancient debts on your records longer than allowed.
Challenge everything on your report and make them prove the debt. It’s their responsibility to prove you owe it, so if they don’t have the documentation, the 3 reporting agencies will take it off, but it takes some work.
As for the call centers, my hubby works for a workforce management company. If you have a crappy time getting through, it’s totally the company’s fault. They have software that arranges schedules and records ‘adherence’.
So they can staff to answer 90% of their calls within a minute if they want. Or they can decide it’s cheaper to keep you stuck in the queue forever.
Phoenician - Politicians talking about “consumers” is a particular peeve of mine. The only way a pol should think about the people is as citizens - we are not defined by what we consume.
to those who Only Ever Call Because The Website Cannot Help Them, Why Do The Phone People Get So Damn Uppity:
you may well only call when the website is broken again. websites break. a lot. agents know the websites break a lot. there is often a separate number you can call for when the website is broken. the people on the phones are CS lackeys; they cannot fix the website. in fact, they are likely looking at the same damn website you are. it is what i had on my screens when i worked in a call centre. it is all we have on our screens. when it is broken for you, it is broken for us, too.
it’s important to take into consideration the sheer volume of calls received in a call centre. sure, you may only be calling because the website is jacked up. however, unless your agent’s shift started
whoa. half my post got eaten. wtf?
(sorry for doublepost. comment box no likey code.)
to those who Only Ever Call Because The Website Cannot Help Them, Why Do The Phone People Get So Damn Uppity:
you may well only call when the website is broken again. websites break. a lot. agents know the websites break a lot. there is often a separate number you can call for when the website is broken. the people on the phones are CS lackeys; they cannot fix the website. in fact, they are likely looking at the same damn website you are. it is what i had on my screens when i worked in a call centre. it is all we have on our screens. when it is broken for you, it is broken for us, too.
it’s important to take into consideration the sheer volume of calls received in a call centre. sure, you may only be calling because the website is jacked up. however, unless your agent’s shift started less than an hour ago, they’ve probably already walked 16+ people through the process of using the damn website, because those who call with website issues are often just about at the level of understanding what the mouse does. i know everyone wants to be a special snowflake who is having a rare and exotic and insoluble problem which must be dealt with OMGIMMEDIATELY!, but understand that there is an entire blizzard of you.
politeness really does help. sometimes you might get an agent who is in an obviously bad mood. understand that they may have just spent twenty minutes (or more) being verbally abused, and that they’re not necessarily in a situation where they can complain, or even take a short break to compose themselves. sometimes you’re going to get an agent who is an ass. some people are just asses. most of the time, though, you’re just dealing with someone who is overwhelmed, exhausted and frazzled. i’ve gotten death threats. i’ve had people identify the location of my call centre. i’ve had them threaten to wait in the parking lot to jump me after work. i’ve had people demand my last name and social security number as leverage against identity theft. immediately after all of those instances, i’ve had to go directly to the next call.
so please try to be patient, at least for a minute or two. most of the time, it will let the agent know that you’re decent. they will be decent in return. try to speak slowly and clearly, and for god’s sake, turn off your television. it’s hard to hear in an open-plan room full of a hundred other people all talking at once, especially if you’re trying to listen through a crappy headset.
to those pissed because they are not immediately transferred to a supervisor:
in some setups, ordinary agents CAN’T transfer you to a supervisor. they may not have phones set up that way. there might be a hundred or more of them crammed into a warren of small desks, with perhaps two or three supervisors at their own desks, across the room. they may have to put you on hold, get up, run around the room until they find one of the supervisors, wait for them to get off the phone with someone else, bring them over to another desk, and have them sit down to speak to you. accordingly, agents are encouraged to try and sort out your problems before finding you a supervisor. there just aren’t enough supervisors to go around. not everyone can speak to a supervisor, and sometimes, even when you can, the supervisor may not be able to help you. they’re cogs in the machine, just like the lowly people who initially answer the phone. at least make a good-faith effort to solve your problem with an agent before demanding a supervisor, and accept that even the supervisor may not be able to fix things right away.
more often than you’d guess, people demand to speak to a second or a third supervisor. sometimes, centres don’t HAVE a second or third supervisor. supervisors have to eat lunch, too. sometimes there’s only one supervisor per shift, and sometimes they’re busy. i have seen a floor supervisor grab a random agent and sit them down to impersonate a supervisor, because the dick on the phone refused to believe that a hispanic or a woman could be at supervisor-level. i have seen this happen more than once. that day, the only supervisor available happened to be a hispanic woman, so that was fun.
finally: long wait-times are not always the faults of the people at the call centre. when our phone systems go down — which happens, a lot — they have to call tech support and wait on hold just like you do. when you have a four-hour wait time, that’s often what’s happened.
kidlacan speaks the truth. I totally agree.
Reading Auguste’s post made me think of a recent call that my husband made to activate a replacement credit card which had arrived in the mail. (New expiration date.) He used the speakerphone, intending to quickly get the new card ready to go, and I heard the young lady give him the hard sell on all kinds of stuff before proceeding with the activation.
He was patient and let her say her piece before declining courteously, but I actually felt bad for her. I’m sure she was being held accountable for going through the spiel, and she had to keep going even though he obviously wasn’t interested.
For what it’s worth, I live in the northeast and have used PNC Bank for 20 YEARS and their service has been most excellent. I’ve never had any trouble getting a human being. They’ve made it difficult to call branches directly but there are ways to work around this: Just visit your branch to do something routine, then take note of the names of the employees. Collect their business cards if you have them. Most of the time the branch phone number is on the cards. Even if the phone number on the cards is an 800 number you have their NAMES! Drop them with impunity: “I have an urgent message for Steve Brown at X branch.”
Something I’ve noticed about myself: I used to be a damn sheep when it comes to following directions. No more! Once when I had one of those weird problems (old credit card) that wasn’t addressed by RoboVoice I just pushed the button that indicated my card had just been stolen. A human being answered. Fancy that! Of course a human being answered: The company is highly motivated to prevent $$$ theft because the company has to forgive any charges to the account that weren’t mine! After I apologized for pressing the “wrong” button I was immediately dispatched to a human who solved my weird problem.
Puffed up by my cleverness, I’ve applied this approach to customer service everywhere: What is in their best interests to fix? OK whatever that is, THAT’S my problem. Gas leak? Okay then. Broken water meter? Yup, that’s me. Then I apologize for pressing the wrong button. So long as they don’t patch me back to another RoboVoice I’m golden.
Hm. Curious: I’ve been commenting with this handle for about a week but every post of mine gets caught by the spambot. I wonder what I’m doing wrong: Do I blather on for too long? Am I using bad words? I’ll stop doing bad things, just let me know what they are.
Oh wait. It’s the Viagra Oysters handle, isn’t it? Drat. There is really such a thing called Viagra Oysters (plain oysters pumped up with Viagra, no really) and I don’t wanna take it out cause I think it’s funny. Sniff. Spoze I’ll have to.
I love my small little credit union. I have a problem, I go in on Saturday morning, I talk to a lovely person who makes the problem go away, smiles at me and then I go away happy. No more problem.
Banks hate credit unions. That alone makes me love credit unions even more, as I think of banks as one of the Sources of Evil in the Modern World.
Yes, I have been there, so I have all due sympathy. I’ve dealt with the “I swear it’s plugged in” people and the “Don’t talk down to me, because I’m a PhD in an unrelated field” people, among others.
However, when I get CSRs who immediately jump to calling me by my first name and then refuse to listen to the actual problem I am describing, I think it’s perfectly reasonable for me to get a little upset. Especially when I advise them that I’ve already researched the issue on their web site or have listened carefully to all of the phone prompts.
I will ask for a supervisor to report a good experience. Unfortunately, it seems that those opportunities are fewer than reporting a complaint.
This is what got me when I worked for the cable company, they would ask for tons of info from the customer, who was then put on hold for 30 minutes so that I could ask for the same info to look up their account. I don’t understand any more than they did why they had to do all that. Roughly 70% of the calls I got were for outages, which the automated system can’t handle because we had to make sure it wasn’t user error or equipment failure, and I’m not sure why we didn’t just have a team of people at the call center whose only job was to process outage calls (since the computerized system could have easily sorted those). The rest were people calling to make payment arrangements, so Joe in Bangor had to wait 45 minutes to get ahold of us to pay his bill because Jane in Ohio had her cable knocked out by a storm system, and they both have to spend five minutes punching private information into a dumb computer and arguing with me that I should “have that information already” (which of course I didn’t because it would be a security violation).
Oh, and service industry people are generally not rude “just because”. We get frustrated with how stupid the system is just as much as the customers, and we have to deal with customers yelling at us about things we have no way of fixing. When you factor in the amount of abuse we take and then realize that we’re paid almost nothing to take it, you can see why we might be a bit short. Generally speaking, both the rudest and the nicest people get fed up and quit first, leaving a core team of dryly sarcastic folks who honestly don’t give a damn. I’d say we don’t get paid enough to give a damn, but I don’t think any amount is enough to be called filthy names for 9 hours every day and have our intelligence constantly questioned. Honestly, most customer service people are sorry that the company is screwing you, the company is screwing them too, just in a different manner.
Oooh! I know! I know!
The reason they have you enter all your information, even if they don’t have any way to use the info entered is to slow you down!
Seriously. It gives the calls in the queues an extra minute or 2 of waiting time while the customer is “busy” and not realizing that they are already waiting for service.
Now, some companies actually have the ability to use that info and go fully automated, but the call routing software is available to collect the inputs even if they never go anywhere.
“C.S.Strowbridge
Jul 7th, 2007 at 9:46 pm
I used to get a ton of those applications every week. I called a couple of companies and told them to stop, but it didn’t help. Then I signed up for a card saying my occupation was, “Bum’ and my yearly income was $1.69.
The applications stopped coming”
ha I used to get calls to sign up for a new card. I would say oh great! I need a card because I’ve maxed out all the others. I need about ten grand. how soon can you get me the card. I was planning on taking a trip and I don’t have any money.
I love my small little credit union. I have a problem, I go in on Saturday morning
eh. on saturday morning on want to be fishing on the lake. I never go to the bank on a weekend. I go to the atm during the week, sometimes. mostly I just get extra cash at the supermarket when I buy groceries.
my pay is direct deposit; most all my expenses are paid by electronic check, on a schedule setup for months. I wire any excess cash to my investment account.
I pay my credit card by transferring funds from checking.
I have never had a problem.
Phoenician, I just figured the problem with that title was that its acronym is TACT.
I just got a letter from some company I’ve never heard of that’s in charge of verifying checks for companies - some employee sold all my info to third parties. This will be the third fraud alert I’ve placed on my account in less than three years.
recently i had to call the manufacturer of my car because i couldn’t figure out how something on the dashboard worked, and it was not clearly explained in the manual. the person on the phone basically had a very, very, VERY slow computer on which a .pdf file of the manual was stored, and could do nothing except page through the very same manual i kept explaining to him i had already read. he then went to get his manager, who essentially pointed over his shoulder at the computer screen and told him that if the answer was not there, then they could not help me. this phone conversation took 15 minutes, most of which was on hold while the phone person talked to his supervisor. this was also a 100% domestic non-outsourced phone call. i think it was the poor kid’s first job out of high school by the sound of his voice. the experience certainly made me think a lot less of the car manufacturer, but i have only compassion for the kid who was given basically zero tools to do an ugly and heartbreaking job.
i have been at the receiving end of the absolute worst behavior from both service industry customers and providers. all things considered, i have more sympathy for the customers. whether or not the individual is an a**hole, the customer is talking to you because something went wrong with their experience; you as service person are getting paid (however little) to help them remedy this disappointment. i am generally pro-labor in my outlook, but i feel like if you’re getting paid the least you can do is provide some sort of service.
having said that - the propensity for american consumers to treat service industry staff as medieval serfs is appalling, sickening, and completely unsurprising.
Not just Americans; I live in supposedly polite Canada and it is often the same thing. Occasionally, though, you win one; when I was a teenager (working in a grocery store) a particularly assholish customer gave me the straight line of the century. He was in the midst of a long, boring, angry-pompous, threatening I’m So Much More Important Than You lecture about my terrible customer service when I cut him off dead with a quiet one liner: “The problem is not mine, sir. The problem is that you cannot distinguish between service and servile“.
We get calls from various collection agencies and creditors about overdue payments.
The trouble is, my girlfriend and I are both caught up. The calls are for someone else, someone neither of us has ever heard of. Either he used to have our number, or he pulled a random 7-digit number out his ass and put that down because he never intendede to pay in the first place. Since we’ve now had that number for more than two years with no sign of the calls slowing, we almost never answer the landline.