Phones are social tools only
The telephone has become useless for interacting with businesses. Actually, it happened a long time ago, when companies (and governments) decided they could save money (rather than serve customers) by installing ridiculous answering technologies, including those where you have to actually speak with a machine! And who programs these things anyway? Who decides what should be on what menu and that pressing zero gets you no where?
It’s especially “fun” with utility companies, who route you through an endless array of choices, each time requiring that you enter some numbers, “so I can access your account.” This would be fine, if that information was then passed from menu to menu, but it isn’t. When you (finally) get to the point where the machine actually lets you talk to a human being (term used loosely), you have to repeat the same damned information.
Then, after bouncing around for 15 minutes, you’re placed in the queue “to speak with a customer service agent,” only to be told that your wait will be 10 minutes, during which time you’re forced to listen to marketing messages (unwanted, but is there any other kind?) and the most God awful music ever licensed for public use.
And here’s what really galls me. Once you’ve successfully navigated the mine field, the guy at the other end doesn’t speak English! Well, in HIS country, they may call it English, but to me, it’s just gobbledygook.
Verizon now has immediate online chat, which I’m convinced is the way we’ll all be dealing with businesses in the future. The telephone is terribly convenient, but only if both sides think it’s so. Because if the one end of the line considers it a nuisance, it’s that way for everybody.
Online chat’s also better, because it’s easier to understand misspelled words than those mispronounced.
So put a fork in telephones; they’re done! One day, our museums will show phones to be an archaic way that consumers and businesses used to speak with each other. The sign will say, “The Telephone: A 20th Century communications mechanism designed to connect people with each other and the institutions that served them. Rendered irrelevant as a business tool in the early 21st Century, because the cost of speaking with customers outweighed the need.”
August 14th, 2007 at 4:43 pm
Interesting observation about the type of English one’s libel to hear at the end of a customer service phone-loop. what I discovered–in part from watching an excellent documentary on a Bagalore call center, and from listening to the people on the other end–is that they’re taught a particular kind of specific English, and don’t get our subtleties. We speak rather colloquially, and they just do not get the colloquialisms. They also can’t interpret when we don’t know the exact term to describe what we want. So, when it comes down to it, chat might just be better. It’s easier to understand because there’s no inflection, and we can catch ourselves in colloquialisms. It doesn, however, remove a particular human touch (trust me, all day online can make one a bit starved for another human voice.) Personally, I’d just like to see more people on this side of the Pacific making a living wage by working in call centers. But, I’m dreaming….