Customer Service – Whatever Happened to Ernestine?
People talk about “customer service” but no one does anything about it. Instead, we have decided to forgo customer service in favor of “efficiency.” I’m talking about those wonderful phone calls we have to make to talk to machines and punch 17 buttons in order to get to talk with a real person. I am usually a very calm person but I get tense just thinking about having to do this. I become another person (a crazy one), and my husband has to leave the room.
Two calls this week sent me over the edge. In the first, a charge was automatically added to our checking account because we neglected to tell the company we didn’t want the automatic renewal. My husband and I both spent an hour trying to get the company to remove the charge. In the other case I had to find out why I was being billed for merchandise I had already returned.
When I start these phone calls, when I first hear the “Please listen to this menu of options…” I have taken to madly hitting “0″ multiple times, hoping I will get connected to a real human being without having to go through the maze of listening to options and pressing buttons, only to find out that there is no customer service person anywhere in that company’s universe. By the way, that little trick about punching in the “0″s actually works about half the time.
With the second call, when I finally got to Customer Service, the gentleman started out by asking “How are you today?” as if that would make up for the impersonality of their system.
My least favorite customer service phrase: “Customers are our #1 Priority.” What does that mean? Back when I was growing up, people didn’t talk about customer service on the phone. They just did it. Like Ernestine. Remember her?
Ernestine knew how to talk to people. She may have been rude sometimes, but at least she was a real human being. I would love to go back to the days of Ernestine. Yes, I know that means party lines and dial phones and – heaven forbid! – corded phones that you can’t carry in your pocket or walk from room to room with. But there is something to be said for real people.
Have you found any tricks to keep calm or get through the maze of phone customer service? Does your business have a real person answering the phone?
