Robin Sieger Blog

How often have you been on the telephone to a call centre, going from automated menu to automated menu when all you really want to do is talk to a real person?

It is sadly an experience we have all had. You the customer, the person who pays the service provider a fee for the service, find yourself impotent when it comes to getting even the most basic satisfaction from your service provider. Suddenly, after 22 minutes of waiting in a phone queue a customer service agent comes on the phone. You at this point are ready to explode and when their tone is less than helpful you either may feel incandescent with rage or totally deflated and unvalued. I don’t know which end of that spectrum applies to you, most of us I imagine lies somewhere in the middle. When we sense the person is reading from a script or giving us stock answers to whatever problem we present them with, and no matter how much they tell us that they are trying to help we just feel they’re not.

This past month I’ve been on the phone to the company which manages my merchant services, the people who handle all credit card transactions both through the office and online on behalf of my business. They have been collecting my money for years but since January they have not forwarded any of this money to me, the reason was my company changed its name and therefore its legal status.  However every time I called to make an enquiry as to why I was not informed, no reason is given, none at all, other than “you should have been notified”.  They then told me I am to go online and change my status plus then get a witnessed compliance forms signed. I got contradictory information, promises of calls returned (that never happen), in short everything that could possibly go wrong for a customer not receiving the good service has happened to me over the past month.

I realise I have two choices, one I can get very frustrated and indignant in the process become a victim and repeatedly tell everyone I speak to of my disappointment at their lack of professionalism when dealing with a client who every month pays them fees, on top of an annual fee of around $500. In fact I tried this approach, I was never rude to anyone of the telephone but certainly spoke in the manner of a New England schoolteacher of the 1830’s (don’t ask why but the allegory seems to fit) would do, with a degree of authority in my voice in the hope it would get them to wake up and help me, all I got was standard replies, and promises of supervisors calling me back, plus let me not forget the occasional e-mail requests for specific forms I had not been told about before that I needed to send in.

Desperate times call for desperate measures so I decided to go to plan B. Plan B, was the charm offensive, I decided that I would ask for help in a kind and non confrontational tone, I would repeatedly thank them, I would tell them of my previous experience without being critical. Where I finally got through to the operator I made a note of writing her name (Holly) down and using it continually throughout our conversation, I use phrases such as "can you help me" and I was appreciative of the help they were giving me and great job they were doing on my behalf, adding that I wished I’d spoken to her at the beginning of this scenario.

All of a sudden Holly was my champion in the system, and took personal responsibility for seeing that I would have excellent service and complete resolution of my problem added to that they are insisting that the refund is given to me and consideration is also given the interest lost on the money being held since January. I should add that they promised to call me back today.

I’m sending this out in my blog one because a) I felt I needed a little bit of a rant, but more importantly b) because I really want to see a plan B. is going to work so watch this space and hopefully there will be another blog very very shortly within the next few hours to let you know if Holly called back or not.

One final thing is said the greatest motivator is the need to be appreciated and the need to be understood and I made a point when I spoke to Holly to understand  that she sits in front of her computer screen all day and continually receives telephone calls from people who want something done, immediately. So I made a big effort to appreciate what she was doing from me, and it seems to work wonders. However time will tell.

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