Customer service hell (or America, as it’s also known)

Customer satisfaction isn’t exactly a particular focus for New Yorkers. In fact, on the list of 500 Things Every Business Must Do To Be Successful in NYC, “making sure that the customer is happy” appears just below “don’t leave dead rats in your reception area.” It sometimes feels that if you walk into a shop to ask for a particular product, you should just be grateful to still be walking when you leave. Getting the product as well would be a minor miracle.

Being a New Yorker strikes me as being perfect training for life in a call centrecenter. After all, if you’re only interested in getting the answer you want, and you’ll repeat your point-of-view up to 327 times if it means that you’ll get it, you either live in New York or you make your living taking customer queries over the phone.

Personally I’d rather have pins stuck in my eyes than have to make contact with a call centrecenter, but sometimes you just can’t escape it. Like when your cable box decides not to operate for no apparent reason. Which – on the first day of the school summer holidayvacation – is about as popular as Hannah Montana being drafted in as a last minute rock festival replacement for Megadeth.

Maybe it was the latent panic in my voice, or perhaps it was my dulcet English tones, but I swear I had to repeat myself thirteen times just to make my unwitting ‘phone operative’ understand what I was saying. To be fair, that’s nothing unusual. What was slightly more disturbing was the start and end of the call, when the Time Warner Cable employee attempted to set a land speed record for most sales messages crammed into a three second spell. I’m pretty sure that she offered both broadband and telephone services in her patter, but to be honest she could have offered me a night with Drew Barrymore and I’d be none the wiser.

I assume that every employee is so used to New Yorkers hanging up on them as soon as they get the opportunity, that they’ve been told to talk as quickly as possible in the desperate hope that the person on the other end of the line catches a word or two. It may not result in many sales, but at least they can say that they got through the script.

Nothing beats Ticketmaster though. Calling them this morning, I was forced to enter into an extensive and fiendishly complicated automated phone system, input my 73 digit booking code, and then go on hold for fifteen minutes. And when I finally came off hold, the first thing the Ticketmaster employee said to me was “Good morning, my name is Tom, how might I offer you world-class customer service today?”

Is “stop talking like a robot, and tell your bosses not to lose my sodding tickets for Eddie Izzard next time” an acceptable answer?

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