CUSTOMER “SERVICE” Elusive at best (Shutterstock).

I have recently emerged – along with my brilliant bride – from the darkest depths of  today’s modern most heartless society: customer “service.”

In too many settings, the term is an oxymoron, sort of like a humble politician or a slow sprinter. The best thing you can sometimes say about it is: “it’s better than nothing.”\

Summarizing here, I had a problem with my computer stuff and oh, abandon all hope, ye, who enter here.

The pitfalls one encounters here include:

  • customer “service” reps located on another continent who don’t speak English well.

  • customer “service” reps who may speak English correctly, but whose speech is so accented and delivered so rapidly you still have no idea what’s being said.

  • customer “service’ reps who are working from a half-page script of  “answers,” the last part of which is “I’m going to put you on hold for a minute,” which means you can probably leave the house, do your shopping and return before he/she gets back to you.

Not all big companies are like this; I have received excellent and well-pronounced help from Apple, for example. But our two-day ordeal could have been solved with two or three simple sentences … in fact, I felt I had been sentenced to IT jail during that time.

Companies spent millions on advertising to get you to buy their product or services. It seems to me if they directed more of that outlay to giving the customer true service – and I don’t just mean “lip service,” – they’d be money ahead and my blood pressure would be normal.