Some Recent Customer Experiences...

ecamulli — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 13:13:39 GMT

Electrical storms came through town a couple weeks ago. A few cracks of thunder actually shook the house they were so close. After the storm passed, lo and behold the digital cable was out and our phone had no dial tone. I was really feeling cut off from the world, it was a bizarre feeling...no phone, no TV and no internet. So I used my cell phone, of course, to start placing phone calls. The cable company experience was pretty good. They do some remote tests on your box to make sure that's okay. But more importantly, the agent knew on the spot that our area was experiencing an outage and that it was being worked on. The fact that it took 2 1/2 days fix was rather annoying, but I have know idea how severe the issue was so I gave them the benefit of the doubt... and they gave me a credit for the time I was out of service.

The phone issue got resolved in the end, but getting there was frustrating. They have a speech recognition system you have to deal with and to tell you the truth, I haven't run accross one yet that doesn't frustrate me. You have to have tremendous patience to deal with these things, and I had very little at the time I called. Below I have stepped through my experience for you:

She (the virtual assistant) asks you questions. You go along with the virtual reality game and answer them as they are asked. But right after she asks a question, there's no pause...she continues talking or explaining something that you don't care about. So you interrupt her and shout, "YES!" so you can keep this thing moving along. At which point she says, "I'm sorry, did you say, "make a payment?""
I've now moved ahead in my virtual conversation to the point where I'm trying to schedule an appointment for a tech to come out to the house. As she's reading off the available time slots, I'm whispering them to my wife to see if she's good with it. The virtual assistant, who has bionic hearing, picks up on these whispers and indicates, "you have selected 1:00..."
So now I'm yelling out all sorts of keywords to get her to go back to rattling off the available appointment times. My wife looks at me like I've gone completely insane or suddenly developed tourets syndrome. "Back! Return! Appointments! Schedule!" But all of this blurting out of words is getting me nowhere. She keeps telling me she didn't understand or that now I want to make a bill payment. I'm just about out of patience.
So I try an different approach, and I start explaining exactly what I want to do just as if I was talking to a real human being. Afterall, isn't this what she's supposed to be replacing? I sounded like this, "I'm trying to get back to the appointment scheduler thing because I was whispering to my wife the times and you thought I wanted 1:00 when really that's not going to work..." Oh, what a nightmare. Now I really have gone insane. I'm talking to a server in a cold data room somewhere.
Next I try a new set of keywords..."Agent! Operator! Help! Zero!" But none worked. She kept saying she didn't understand. Maybe she didn't like my tone of voice. I also pushed zero about 5 times on my phone and got nowhere as well.

I finally admited defeat and hung up. 14 years in telecom and I couldn't out smart the system. I couldn't believe it. Feeling dejected, I went into a cone of silence, called back and made no mistakes this time. The tech came out and fixed the green box and all was well again.

In closing, I believe we are very far off from replacing human customer service representatives. I just want to talk to somebody. Is that so wrong?

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Some Recent Customer Experiences...