May I Help You?

Let's talk about telephone customer service. Today I called AT&T to check on setting up wi-fi for my home. I have DSL through them and, after searching everywhere I could think of on their website for the quick answer, I decided to call customer service. BIG MISTAKE.

I know it is never fun, but sometimes if you can get past the annoyingly calm and condescending male automated voice and can avoid the 'valley girl-my voice raises at the end of every sentence' female voice there is hope. Today, to begin with I got someone nice who knew nothing about DSL but did seem genuine and ended up talking me through switching to a different phone plan for one of our lines that will save me money. OK, that's fine, but then it went downhill. She said she could switch me to the DSL/modem department and I could ask about a new one. The next thing I know I am listening to the valley girl voice asking me about packages! I quickly began punching O over and over and eventually got a customer service rep, for UPS! Yes, I'm not kidding! The UPS lady said for some reason they keep getting Verizon and AT&T customers transferred to them and she was sorry but she could not transfer me back to AT&T. How long do you think that will continue before the right people get the message and fix it?

My quick question turned into two more routes through the system before I got a real person who could transfer me to DSL and gave me the number in case something went wrong. What I thought would take 15 minutes, ended up taking most of the hour.

I can't change the whole system but I do offer these suggestions:

*Give people a choice of automated voices and replace the annoying voices with ones that have a caring and compassionate tone.

*When someone reports an experience where you get transferred to a completely different company, direct them to someone so it can be reported.

*Teach all of your customer service people to have compassion and be able to say "I'm so sorry that happened to you, I will try to make this a better experience." At least they could acknowledge that you have a right to be a bit upset and they understand.

So be careful out there and if you need to call customer service, be prepared.