Calling Customer Service

Hearing fellow bloggers Word Whiz and Horsetail Snake complain about poor customer service really boils me oil. Business, bah. Mankind should be their business! Our common welfare should be their business! And for some reason it is at this time of the rolling year that we suffer most!

I blame it on high tech. Voicemail, electronic answering machines, fax machines, on-line bot service--all that. Give me someone real who understands me, the customer, and truly wants to help. And I don't want to e-mail you, leave a voicemail message, read a complicated manual, go to your on-line help site or listen to some canned menu recording telling me that I have to press a number to get another canned menu recording.

Sometimes high tech does help in that quest for customer service. Take this past week. My son Greg joined my wife and I as we started a shopping day at the break of dawn with breakfast at a local restaurant. We walked in and waited at the hostess stand. Although there were a few early bird customers sipping coffee at their tables, no hostess or other employee seemed to be around.

No problem, we thought. So we waited a few minutes. Then a few minutes more. Where was the help? After what seemed like a rather unreasonable wait, the phone at the cashier's station began to ring (loudly). "Probably somebody else calling in sick," I commented. Greg shook his head to me, looking a bit sheepish.

At that moment a young lady came out of the back room and picked up the phone, but there was nobody on the other line, so she hung up and promptly seated us. The caller was Greg who dialed the restaurant on his cell phone. Calling customer service! Whatever works, I guess.

I remember a similar situation in a multi-plex theatre complex, the kind where you can get lost trying to find your theatre among a dozen or so others. During the movie, the projector went awry and the film stopped. After a couple minutes of "dead air", a fellow movie-goer got out his cell phone and called the theatre.

He said something to the effect of "Hea, this is xxxxxx in the theatre that is showing The Blair Witch Project. The film just died and nobody's coming down here to fix it. There are a lot of angry people in here right now and we're gonna do something unless you send somebody down here right away."

Of course, we weren't angry. The caller was loud enough for his voice to carry throughout the theatre. Everyone I saw was laughing. But the film was running again very shortly afterwards. Calling customer service. Sometimes the customer wins.