Once upon a time there was this neat thing called customer service. It stood for helping businesses to resolve problems for customers. It was a pretty nice concept way back when it was alive.
A customer purchased an item or a service and usually everything was ok. On the rare occasions when a problem developed, all that was necessary was a call to the Customer Service Dept. and soon every thing was taken care of to the customer's satisfaction. I suppose there were some situations that did not end so well, but those were few and far between.
Today is a different story! The first thing a customer with a problem encounters when calling customer service is a telephone nightmare. According to the business, this is supposed to make the process faster. However, unless the customer has the patience of job and nothing else to do for 15 minutes except listen to the endless menus and decide which one they need, this is a obviously a way to make the customer hang up in frustration and hopefully the customer will go away. Now I really don't think the business wants the customer to go away, but that probably happens frequently.
Once the patient customer makes a selection from the ever aggravating menu, there is usually another equally frustrating wait and the customer is subjected to a tirade about call monitoring and maybe 'go to our website for help'. Then depending on the time of day, month or whatever, the now impatient customer has to wait again for 'the next available representative'. Once this elusive person answers the phone, hopefully something can be resolved, except........the customer cannot understand the representative. It's obvious that the representative's native language is not English and it's also obvious that the representative is speaking with a script that has nothing to do with the customer's problem.
Now on the off chance that the customer can understand the representative, the customer is quite possibly given incorrect information. So the problem escalates for the customer.
So what's going on? I guess the bottom line is the business' balance sheet, anything for a profit. According to some so called experts, sending call centers to another country is good for consumers. What I want to know, how is it good for consumers? It can't be that prices are kept in line, prices just keep going up. Some friends of mine that used to work in a call center (for not a lot of money) are now unemployed and are looking for work. When customers call and get a canned answer to a problem or get someone who can't speak so the caller can understand, how is that 'good for the consumer'?