Incompetence seems to be the new normal everywhere.
I am so tired of having to give myself the service that I deserve as a customer. We need to take back the night – the customer needs to be king or queen and not be dictated to anymore and have their time wasted.
Why should I have to sit and wait for three hours on hold on the phone to check a flight detail with our national airline, never receive a reply to my formal complaint to them, and receive absolutely no response to my travel query to them on Facebook that I used as a last resort to have my query answered! This is completely unacceptable and not good service in anyone’s eyes.
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I am also sick and tired of call centre operators who are not trained and have to run away every two minutes, and leave you waiting on hold, to go and check with their supervisors on every question you have. It must be very humiliating for them as staff to have to do this.
Train these people and don’t make the customer wait on the line while the call centre operator types into some database to do their job. Not my problem. Let the customer off the phone once what is needed is communicated, don’t ask them to hold on and wait while they fill in their forms on their computer. Not acceptable. More waste of my time.
A friend told me this week the real estate agents who manage her investment properties expect her to log into some database and do all the work herself. She told them no, send me the statements, she is not remembering one more password and fiddling around with all these portals. If they want her business, they [should] send her the statements by email direct.
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Another friend said a call centre operator kept repeating the same phrase over and over again in response to anything she said – obviously reading from a script, which she said she found infuriating. This is good material for a comedy script, I think.
We need to take back the night and tell them what service we want as the customers, and accept nothing less!
Some companies are excellent and offer a phone call-back service if they are busy on the phone, which is really great.
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Companies giving shocking service need to be publicly shamed for their poor service – online reviews and portals, write to management – whatever! – and the companies giving excellent service, publicly praised so standards can rise.
The whole call centre process and how they deal with customers needs a major overhaul, in my opinion. It’s appalling.
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