How was your weekend?

This is not how you are suppose to spend your Sunday afternoon.

One hour and 45 minutes on phone with wireless phone company disputing erroneous charges on your phone bill. The company shall remain nameless as I refuse to give them any publicity – either good or bad – until our contracts are up.

There will be a separate lengthy post at that time since I’m not willing to pay $1000.00 to get out of our five-phone contract. Oh yes, I have it all documented.

I can promise that I have enough material for a bad sitcom.

46 minutes on phone with phone company who provides your internet service because their outage caused your wireless network to stop working and only one computer can send things to the printer now.

Said technical support did attempt to blame computers and printer but I was prepared since computers and printer do work – please let me say this again, s-l-o-w-l-y…

“They all stopped working together when your company had a service outage.”

Seventeen years as a customer and he wanted to send me to the “Fee-based support desk” because my problem was beyond their free basic support. PhilBillPaul asked if paying our monthly bill constituted fee-based support.

If there was any fun to be had it was in relaying back to PhilBillPaul the ignorant canned response of Mr. Tech Support about my problem being out of his scope of service and that I had spent 46 minutes on the phone with him so he could tell me what I already knew when I called. Our printer doesn’t work within the wireless network and yes, it did in fact work with all computers up until their outage.

Thank you for reminding me of the problem I called about 45 minutes ago.

Apparently hearing what he said repeated back to him in my voice must have struck a chord on how idiotic it all was. He offered to overnight a new router to help us “isolate” the problem before we talk to the “fee-based support desk.”

Um, yeah, okay – great idea.

Could we have done that in the first 5 minutes?

32 minutes on the phone with cell phone manufacturer explaining that your teen son’s phone screen is broken and his father was with him when it happened so yes, we are sure it wasn’t from misuse or liquid or being carelessly dropped.

Side note: We happen to be experts on the liquid damage as two phones have gone through the washing machine and one has been dropped in the toilet. All done by teens at our house.

Lucky for us, the phone is under their warranty and of course, you must deal directly with the manufacturer, NEVER the place you actually purchased the phone. That would actually make sense and resemble customer service.

Well, I take that back. PhilBillPaul reminded me that we can pay the unnamed wireless phone company $35.00 to look at a broken phone under warranty.

The good news? I don’t have to make these calls on Monday morning when the hold time lasts into Tuesday. Sometimes I have called and listened to a company greeting that actually recommends that you call back on another day – seems like a staffing issue to me.

The bad news? It felt about the same as spending the day with defensive teenagers who seem to say every single day, “It’s not my fault” and “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Maybe I’m still cranky from Sunday.

I swear I start out nice on these calls because I do feel sorry for these people who have these jobs and have to work on Sunday and have people like me call them.

But by the end of the call it is hard to be nice as I am exasperated and exhausted.

I think it is only fair to tell you as I rant about this that many, many years ago I was actually a customer service manager at a cellular company. In fact, it is where I met PhilBillPaul and he was the service center manager at the same company. We do know a thing or two about providing excellent service.

Customer service suggestion:
If companies want to really improve their customer service, how ’bout if they start paying the customer for every minute they have to waste talking to customer no-service whenever they screw up your bill or your service?

One more question:
Is it really that hard to provide excellent customer service?

Maybe I’m just hormonal. So really, how was your weekend?