We're Here To Help

After helping a family friend with some computer issues, I am completely awed by the customer service standard we have allowed ourselves to accept.  I won't bore you with my desperate attempts to save a far gone hard drive but put your seat belts on before we dig into the call.

Jennifer explains to me that she's getting some blue screen and the computer is in this kind of reboot loop.  It had been doing this for months.  This result is due to a hard drive error and instead of trying and failing to combat the problem until I'm blue in the mouth, I informed her that as long as the laptop was still under warranty, Dell should be able to fix it no problem.

I gave it my best shot anyway and then turfed her to their tech support.

I bet you can tell where this story is going: overseas!
Everything boils down to our troubled economy (again, not just because I'm an economist) and how we sent away a few of our jobs for cost purposes.  I understand that you have to work every angle from a cost/benefit analysis and that sometimes other markets just have a better comparative advantage when it comes to certain tasks and products.  This notion however, does not give carte blanche for those companies that did take advantage of these policies by neglecting the conditions of their new work force.

The first person to answer the phone once we passed through the automated triage read from a script.  In my personal dealings with companies that start off this way, things don't typically get resolve on this first call.  He took some basic information, used terms like "Ma'am" and "Miss".  All in all, he could have had a personality and he could have actually acted like he cared about the problem (minimum wage doesn't cover the cost of giving a shit).

Jennifer isn't computer savvy.  How would she have been able to convey the true issue to somebody she can't understand?  I knew the issue wasn't a virus but the way she described it, you really wouldn't know unless you had that face-to-face conversation.  Her issue was a hard drive issue and those are always, pending you didn't dump a bowl of chicken noodle soup down your keyboard, covered by warranty.  His first instinct was to tell her that viruses are not covered by a warranty.  Me, I have a hot temper and this would have sent me off the handles and onto the twitterverse.  Once we cleared the gatekeeper, we were transferred to tech support, likely the guy in the cube across the hall.  He's oral skills weren't much better and because of the incessant recaps, a 10 minute call dragged on for 35!

What happened to 90 seconds or less?  What's that? Not McDonald's.

Really though, customer service jobs are shit.  People don't think there is a real person on the other end of the phone or the computer and that puts a chip on their shoulder that having a face-to-face conversation simply doesn't allow for, well, that is unless you are a complete ass.

I've had some pretty craptastic customer service jobs and I understand how that cloak of invisibility makes them feel all powerful while make you wonder when Alice handed you the Drink Me glass.  This is something we have to think about going forward though.  Will we understand that once the complaints start rolling in via social media that there truly is a rift that formed between companies and their customer base because of the overseas outsourcing of customer service phone support? Or will companies continue to think in terms of dollar signs and rely on the fact that as long as there are more dollar signs than not things are still chugging along.