Companies, please stop insulting my intelligence. Stop telling me that the extra hoops I have to jump through, the robots you want me to interact with, and the unpaid work I’m doing for you – which you used to do for me – is somehow for my convenience.
The following is just the latest of these increasingly common and maddening experiences.
One Saturday evening a couple of weeks before Christmas, I had just settled in for the night with a glass of wine and a film, after a busy afternoon running our village’s annual Christmas fair, when I heard a loud bang outside my house.
It sounded like metal on metal – a horrible distinct noise. I jumped up and ran outside into the pitch black and thick, freezing fog to discover that my neighbour’s mum had accidentally reversed her car into my parked car. Thankfully, nobody was hurt. We had a quick look around both cars and, to our untrained eyes, there didn’t seem to be much damage, so we decided to leave it until the following morning to have a better look and decide what to do next.
So, the next morning I see that the damage is a scrape on the front bumper and a smashed fog light. A friend in car repairs tells me I should contact my insurance company. I know it was an accident, and accidents happen, but this was now another job to add to my never-ending to-do list. Shouldn’t take too long to sort out, though – a quick call to my insurance company and Bob’s your uncle.
First step is to go to my insurance company’s website to get a phone number – an easy task you might think! I’m severely dyslexic, so talking is my preferred choice of communication as it is quicker and easier for me. What I don’t want to do is read lots of information– most of which is irrelevant to me - and be directed to what feels like every single page of their website. I just want to make a quick call and to speak to someone who can tell me what I need to do.
After a frustrating time of trying to navigate my way through the website, clicking on the Help Centre and logging into ‘My Account’, I couldn’t find a telephone number anywhere. The so-called ‘Help Centre’ was anything but. And why is it that the questions I always have aren’t frequently asked?
When I finally did find a number (from a letter they sent to my partner two years ago) I got an increasingly familiar message. How come every company I ring is ‘experiencing a high volume of calls at the moment.’? Am I just unlucky and happen to call just as everybody else does? No. We know the real reason for the delay, don’t we? What the message is really saying is ‘We don’t care that much about you but we really care about our profits. That’s why we haven’t employed enough people to handle the volume of calls a business like ours should reasonably expect.’
Let’s not forget that I’ve already acted as an unpaid employee of theirs at the beginning of my relationship with them. It was me that completed all the forms and arranged the payment of the premium – they didn’t do anything! And they’ve had to do nothing so far for that money.
Anyhow, I now have to go through a frustrating process – you know the thing, press 1 for this, 2 for that, with the admirable intention of getting me through to the right person. Unfortunately, my query didn’t seem to fit in the narrow range of options and there wasn’t the common option of ‘hold for any other query’. So I pressed the number for the option that sounded roughly right.
To my surprise, my call was answered quite quickly. I wonder if a high volume of callers had been put off by the ‘high volume of calls’ message? I was, of course, not through to the right person though. I had to be transferred to another person. I have no idea what department they were in or which numbers I should have pressed to get to them.
In the process of transferring me to this other person, I think I was also transferred back in time to the 1990’s. I say this because there was an annoying and unnecessary delay when we were speaking, like you used to get on international calls back in the day. This meant a very painful and longer than necessary conversation. And whilst I very much enjoyed the 90’s I don’t want to go back there!
The transmission delay caused me confusion and frustration. The person I spoke to was pleasant enough but they were not well-trained. They were speaking off a script, which my question wasn’t on. So I got answers to questions I didn’t ask and not to the ones I did ask. That isn’t my idea of good customer service and I’m struggling to identify which bit of this whole experience was for my convenience.
The experience I’ve just described will be familiar to nearly all of us, but what do we do about it? Nothing. We just keep taking lower and lower levels of customer service and paying higher and higher costs. Not me though, not any longer.
As a result of this painful, unhelpful, time-wasting exercise I have put a note in my diary when my car insurance expires, to start looking for quotes from companies that pride themselves, and have excellent reviews, on their customer service. And a phone number on their website, so I can speak to them!
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