Honjii's Harangues

India Should Change Name to Customer Service

Is there anything more frustrating than customer service?  If names are descriptive, then shouldn’t it be called something like “here is the telephone number that will make you want to tear your hair out and scream obscenities”. Getting a live person on the phone is only the first hurdle.  Most of the time you are caught in recording HELL, where pressing the option you think you want, actually repeats the options you just heard.  It used to be that you could press zero and get a live person.  They’ve gotten wise to us because often when you press zero the recorded voice tells you that you have pressed an incorrect key, or that our response was not recognized. 

Now there are websites like http://gethuman.com/ that have a large database of phone numbers that will get you through to a human, though I suppose these numbers will keep changing because I think the main goal here is to make sure no one ever reaches a real person.  Not that it matters because if you actually manage to reach a living, breathing human they either cannot speak or understand English, have the IQ of a doorknob, or are just plain incapable of listening to your explanation of whatever issue you are calling about and don’t really give a rat’s ass, or all of the above. I’ve often wondered if the reason it is so hard to get a real human on the phone is our (my) misguided assumption that we are calling a large corporation, housed in a large corporate office building with hundreds of people manning the phones dealing with customer problems with their product which is obviously inferior in the first place or why else would they need these hundreds of people manning phone lines in the customer service department (whew….that was what my high school English teacher would have called a run-on sentence. but hey it makes a point).  Is it possible that a more realistic scenario is a sophisticated answering machine in someone’s spare bedroom?  Maybe the reason you have to wait so long on hold (listening to annoying music or a repetitious recording telling you how much we value your call and that all agents are busy so please continue to hold) is that the phone doesn’t get answered until the baby is diapered, the soap operas are over, the six pack still has three bottles to go, or whatever it is someone might be doing at home. 

Then there is always the good old $2.99 per minute, or $29.95 per call customer service.  This is where you buy a product (usually something expensive) from the company, and then if you have a problem or question about it (that didn’t occur within the first 30 minutes of ownership) you actually have to pay to talk with someone who may or may not be of any real assistance. So much ‘customer service’ seems to now be outsourced to India.  I think ‘they’ don’t want us to know this, and try to fool us by instructing the operators to use American sounding names, as if we wouldn’t notice the very strong Indian accent.  Once I had to call for help and the operator, in his very heavily, barely understandable English introduced himself as Gary.  Just to amuse myself I asked Gary where he was located, he told me he was in Chicago.  I said, “Oh really, how is the weather there today?”  Being in front of my computer I quickly checked the Chicago weather, and discovered it was cold and rainy, while ‘Gary’ told me it was very pleasant outside.   Gary, like several of the other customer service operators I’ve spoken with in India, was extremely hard to understand and while he did know how to use some English words, he was not really able to understand me.  I wondered if perhaps every Indian citizen is required to put in some part of the day answering calls from pesky Americans. I think it was after this particular phone call that I decided to write a letter to the Prime Minister of India and respectfully suggest that the name of the country be changed from India to Customer Service