Why Ask?

I worked in retail for 3 years before I pleaded to God to be set free. I was, however, good at it and my customers LOVED me. They would ask for me by name. That rarely happens at the mall, but I know why it did. I listen and I am nice. Basically, I excel at customer service. That experience taught me the value of customer service and that when you no longer enjoy it and it gets too hard to fake it, you should quit and do something else. It is not the customer's fault that you hate your job. Stop taking it out on them.

I think I have pretty standard expectations for the type of service I should receive when I contact Customer Service departments. I want them to listen to my problem, understand my point of view, tell me the company line, and then work toward a compromise or resolution. This is sadly not how it usually happens.

Take today for instance. Instead of bombarding people with emails, I went on the website and filled out a work order for a computer database issue. I marked it as being of high importance and answered all of their 6 preliminary questions before listing my issue. I even included a screen shot of the error message. You would think that would be enough to indicate that I have a real problem, but NO. What is the first thing this fool does? He tells me to follow the steps that I just told him don't work. Then he says, "I don't know why you would get that message. Has anyone else had this problem?" No and you would know that if you read my answer to your preliminary questions. Then he proceeds to talk to me like I am crazy or stupid or both and at every turn he gets the error message. He even remote accessed my computer and you know what he found when he did it...you guessed it- an ERROR MESSAGE. By this point, I just want to scream, "Now do you believe me! My problem is real."

He tells me that he needs to go and talk to someone else because he can't understand how or why this is happening. So you just wasted 15 minutes of my time going over the information that you asked me to include as a means of expediting the process because you clearly did not read it and now I have a headache and no answer. Thanks!

The same thing happened last week when I submitted a online question to the customer service department for a game that I like to play. They clearly did not read my question because I did not ask about restarting the game I asked about deleting and reinstalling the game. There answer came from the FAQs page. I am at least smart enough to check there first. So here I am opening my email excited to get an answer and all I get is some garbage answer that I could have found myself. Aargghh!

It is not limited to computer customer service. I have the same issue when I call the number to the phone company, airline, or store. They ask you a million questions "to better direct your call" and then the person gets on the phone and has no idea who you are or why you are calling. Why did I spend all that time yelling my selection into the phone if my answers weren't being put into the system somewhere. Is it just to distract me from the ridiculous hold time because it is certainly not to "better service [my] needs". I am not even talking about the repetitive security questions that are supposed to make me feel like you care about protecting my information. I am talking about me saying "Reservation" over and over in different accents trying to get it to register only to have the person on the line ask me again once I get connected. Grrr!

Where is that information going? Clearly you don't have it or are not checking!

I just want to scream out, "Why did you even ask?"