Monday, January 05, 2009

Today's Customer Service Tip

Things not to say if you're a Customer Service Rep:

I had an automated payment returned last week for insufficient funds. Oops, I was playing on the beach, not monitoring my accounts appropriately.

The bank delayed two days before sending me the notice, hampering my ability to rectify the problem. On Friday morning I called customer service and asked why they had delayed notifying me—the initial transaction occurred on the 29th and I wasn't notified until 5:30 on the 31st, when I could do nothing about it.

The CSR said, "we have thousands of customers and only so many agents monitoring the accounts." Excuse me? It's a computer! The monitoring and the sending of e-mail notices is done by a freaking computer!!

Then she asked me if I had enabled my alerts. I told her they had always notified me when there was a problem. She then showed me where the alerts were and I replied, "No one ever told me about alerts before." She said, "Well, we learn something new every day."

Honey, in which of your training classes did they tell you this was a suitable reply to a Valued Customer?

(The thought of their agents monitoring all the accounts reminds me of one of my favorite picture puzzles showing all the little people running around inside the computer moving 1s and 0s to make things happen.)

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