Heckles
Please hold
DOES ANYONE REMEMBER customer service? You know, talking to an employee, as a customer, and receiving help from that employee? Unfortunately customer service has become a lost art that is in serious need of rekindling.
Those apocalyptic movies that feature machines taking over humanity (think The Matrix) are starting to make just a little more sense when you take a look at the services industry. I challenge you to try to find a major company that allows you to talk to a person when you call their hotline. The human connection is dead.
This is due to a very disturbing trend that has turned customer service into a website or phone recording, generating a list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). That’s perfectly fine, but what about queries that are not frequently asked? What about everything else? Apparently the message being sent out is that nobody cares. Your special needs are not special; they’re an inconvenience. Help is not on the way.
I’m going on a trip and I’ve been calling around certain companies with my travel queries. I was absolutely floored when I called Air Canada and discovered that they literally do not have a customer service branch. You cannot call and talk to anyone in customer service. You can however, be cheerfully referred to their FAQ on their website. Next, I tried calling a major department store in the United States to find out if they sold a particular item. Their phone recording offered me two options: Press one for store hours and press two for directions. That was it. There’s no option to talk to a real live person and ask a question. Feeling a little dejected, I made one last attempt with the company I booked the flight with. It was then that I learned that any further assistance I needed would have to be through their customer service email. Again, I could not talk to a real live person. All I could do was use the one email address they had for all customer service queries, pray that it went through, pray for a speedy response, and pray that the reply made its way to my inbox and not my junk mail. When all was said and done I had no answers. Does anybody else find this disturbing?
I’ve worked in retail before. I’ve even been a customer service representative and I’ll be the first to admit that it was sometimes incredibly annoying; often, I questioned humanity as a whole. People really are mind-boggling sometimes. But at the end of the day, it’s better to be annoyed by humanity than to forget about it all together.
