“I’m sorry, let’s try this again….”
As calm as the voice sounds on the other line, you hear yourself utter a curse word out loud. “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite get that. Let’s try this again…,” the voice replies. And now you just want to smash your phone against the wall.
In fear of being reprimanded after reading this article at GigaOm, I’m a little scared to name the provider I’ve been struggling with for 3 days now. In a nutshell, my online order got totally muddled and after spending roughly 4 hours with “The Voice”, the cheezy “hold” music and wait times longer than 10 minutes, I’m just sitting here writing this post. And yes, I’m currently on hold.
But the vein of this post is really customer service and voice recognition software. Well, it’s bad enough that live customer service is pretty much going to the crapper, voice-recognition software is just the cherry on this pie of crap. I have not come across one service provider where I’ve had a less than horrible experience. But I guess with a name like mine, I’m screwed right from the introduction.
There needs to be a balance between innovation and service. You cannot have one overtake the other. It just leads to bigger problems. And I feel we’re slowly heading towards that iceberg. This reference is symbolic only because I’ve now switched to a piano-instrumental of ‘My Heart will Go On’. There needs to be a major upgrade to our service forces. And you cannot just throw bodies at this task and give them a “script” to handle customers. That is as useless as voice recognition software.
I feel like I’m preaching to the choir since everyone of you have horror stories from dealing with customer service. But I can’t help wonder that in today’s technological space age, have we been reduced to screaming expletives to a robotic voice on the other end of the phone?
“Look Dave, I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over. ”
Thank you Mr. Kubrick.
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I could not agree with you more. Customer Service is really going downhill. I just wish companies would invest a little more time (and money) in training their service guys.
↓ Quote | Posted October 2, 2007, 1:36 pm