Welcome to the fascinating world of global customer service!

More and more service companies are now handling their customer service functions from foreign countries, many in India. That’s what I have on my mind today on this Wednesday, March 25, 2009. As far as I am concerned folks are free to do whatever it is they think is best for their company’s goals and objectives. However, they don’t get to call it excellent customer service because they are the provider and the customer is the one who gets to vote on how well it works. Let me take that back. They can call it whatever they want to call it but that doesn’t make it so. You will well remember that famous comment from the 2008 Presidential campaign about putting lipstick on a pig. Lipstick or no lipstick, it’s still a pig! Recently I’ve had opportunity to engage this type of service and it helps to know in advance what you will be getting into before you dial that toll free line.

First you have to get by the elaborate maize provided by the automated stalling front end. The purpose of the automated call center is to defeat as many callers as possible thereby reducing the call activity. Whatever you say in response to its pre-programmed questions it will not recognize it and will eventually only send you to another menu. This is called a modern version of here we go loop to loop. After exhausting your options and yourself you finally get the one that you’ve waited for: Please hold why I try to connect you to a technician. Before you can savor your victory of finally getting through to a ‘real’ person, suddenly you are greeted with this high-pitched shrill voice of a person who sounds like they are doing a voice over for a travel show tour of a boat ride down the Ganges River. Hello? What? Could you say that again? Like I said before, it helps if you know this already because you can try to prepare yourself before embarking on this challenging adventure.

An older semi-retired fellow who works here at the company told me the other day about how he and his wife recently experienced this process. They have a new satellite system and it is very fancy and requires all kinds of controls, passwords, and other things they are not too ready to have to deal with. They had forgotten their base password and had to call and try to retrieve it. He and his wife put the call on the speakerphone and began their trek through the jumbled world of the technology jungle. He thought he would be best at this so she stood by in support as he began to do battle with the first set of hurdles, the automatic answering system. He kept getting louder each time the system failed to recognize his request. He said he kept saying over and over PERSON….PERSON…I want to talk to a real PERSON! His wife kept signaling for him to stay calm but he said he could feel his blood pressure rising. Bingo! It finally gave him that magical message: Please hold while I try to connect you to a technician. He was beaming as his wife sat admiring his technical savvy. Suddenly, the person came on the line and they could not understand even half of what was being said. After a couple of minutes of this, his wife jumped in and he ended up having to shush her for screaming into the speaker. I could go on but it seems the people way over there in that far away land couldn’t give them their password for security reasons but they could change the password for them but it would require them to interact using their computer. At this point, frustrated and ready to explode, my dear friend blurted out: “Can you just please tell me what channel the Astros are playing on and we will leave you alone!” Folks, you can’t make this stuff up. We have a great life don’t we? Thanks be to God who somehow puts up with us even when we get loud when talking to people across the ocean! Amen. ….More later.