R.I.P. Customer Service

“Feel like a number/ Feel like a stranger/ A stranger in this land….” – Bob Seger, Stranger in Town, 1978

“Man, I can’t believe I’ve been on hold for FIVE minutes!”

“Honey, when it gets to be 45 minutes, then you can complain.”

That was part of the exchange between my husband and me the other day, when he was attempting to fix a snafu with his ACA-based insurance.  Obviously, he doesn’t deal with bureaucracy very often; that’s always been my purview. 

For background, I transitioned to Medicare last month, and he stayed with the company we’d been using.  It required canceling the entire policy, then re-applying for just my husband.  I’d sent a check for his premium late in April, just to be sure he was covered.  The insurance company had returned the check, because it had my name on it, and I’m no longer on the policy.  So I’d hurried up and sent another check, making sure only his name was on it.  “All set,” I thought.  “One more thing off the to-do list.”

Well, no.  We got a notice last week that his policy had been terminated due to non-payment.  I checked my records.  Yep, I’d used the bill-pay utility at our credit union to send another check, well ahead of the deadline.  Same utility I use for all our bills, with no hiccups. 

I called the credit union, and they said the check had posted.  I very specifically asked, “So the insurance company has cashed the check, right?”  They assured me that was the case. 

Next stop:  the insurance company.  Eight menu levels in, after repeating my information multiple times, I finally got a person to speak with, who made me go over all the information yet again.  Then she said, “Are you the insured?”  I said that the insured is my husband.  She replied, “He has to call.”  I said, “That’s not possible.  He’s a truck driver.  He’s on the road.  He can’t call.”  She answered, “He’s got to call.  That’s our protocol.”  I said, “But I used to be on the policy.”  She was adamant.  I asked for a supervisor.  Not possible.  I told her that this wasn’t making sense, because my husband couldn’t call.  She hung up on me.  It occurred to me to call back, drop my voice an octave, and declare that I was indeed the insured person, but I didn’t think I’d get away with it.

I called the ACA people, and they said that if the insurance company wouldn’t budge, our only choice would be to reapply, and did I want to do that?  I said yes, just to cover all bases.  Turned out that no insurance would go into effect for a month.  AND, for some mysterious reason, the premium for the same policy had gone up 2½ times from the cost a month ago.  She didn’t know why, as none of our information had changed. 

Next, I called the credit union back, to get more ammunition in the form of proof that the insurance company had cashed our check.  I was again told that the check had cashed, but when I asked how I could prove that, I was given a number to call for the credit union’s payment support group, a third-party entity.  So….another call.  The associate there first confirmed that the check had posted, and when I asked, “Which means that the insurance company processed it?” the woman said, “Well….no.  You see, what happens is, you order a check to be sent, we take the funds out of your account and put them into our account, and then we send the check from our office.  Yes, we’ve deducted the funds from your account, but….let’s see….that check has not cashed.”  “Then, where is it?” was of course my next question.  “Um….hold on a minute.  Uh…that check can be traced to the local post office where the insurance company is.  After that, we don’t know what happened.  Do you want to apply a stop-payment order?  There might be a fee.”  Yikes.  Apparently, the staff in my local credit union branch is unaware of the procedure this last woman in the support office outlined.  They’re telling me that a payee has cashed my check, when that most definitely is not the case.  How can that possibly be?

There are several more chapters to this tale, all equally ridiculous, but the bottom line is that after something like ten phone calls, we’re back to square one, and my husband has decided to see if he can get VA benefits, as he spent four years in the Navy.  I won’t even describe the paperwork involved in that process.

Concurrent with this debacle, I’d received a notice from our county government, stating that I hadn’t completed information required for such-and-such application, and they needed the details posthaste.  I had no idea whatsoever what the notice meant, but thought that I’d better get the matter straightened out, just in case.  I called the number on the notice, a toll-free exchange.  I was told that the expected wait time would be 262 minutes (not a typo), and I could leave a call-back number, which I did.  Twenty-six hours later, I got a return call, and the recording said that, while I was on a priority call, there might be a “brief” wait.  After being on hold 20 minutes, I hung up.  I spent the next half hour attempting to call that particular county office using a local number.  Two that I found didn’t answer.  One was disconnected.  One went to an entirely different division.  One didn’t connect to the county at all.  Through more diligent searching, I discovered the office number for the director of the department in question, so I called, figuring nothing ventured, nothing gained.  The director’s assistant was gracious and accommodating, but made no comment when I mentioned my difficulties in reaching someone.  She could only guess why I might have received the notice in question, and offered to cancel my [imaginary] application.  To keep it simple, I agreed.  She said that if I had any questions or needed further assistance, I could call the toll-free number.  I gave a ten-second summary of my experience with it, and again, she made no comment whatsoever, nothing in the way of sympathy, but asked if I had any other matters.  I was very happy to tell her I didn’t.  The fact that someone in the ivory tower was willing to take care of a minor issue tells me that my call wasn’t the only one like it that that desk has received, and orders have come down for executive assistants to just deal.

In yet another situation, my former insurance company and my healthcare provider had been fighting over charges related to my cataract surgery almost two years ago.  I got put in the middle.  Without overly belaboring the point, the provider ended by dunning me for money three months ago, even though I had been put on an auto-pay plan.  They insisted that no such plan existed, though money had been deducted from my bank account every month for a year.  Finally, I threw in the towel, as I’m sure all parties count on patients to do.  I said, “OK, just tell me how much I owe, and I’ll pay it.”  The billing SUPERVISOR hemmed and hawed and said, “Well, I really don’t know how this was calculated.”  I said, “Look, I’m done with the merry-go-round.  Just give me a number, and I’ll arrange payment.”  She couldn’t give me that number.  Her advice was to set up a payment plan for the number she guessed was accurate, and then, “hope it all works out in the end.”  Hand to God, that’s what she said.  How scary is that, when she’s the department supervisor?  If she doesn’t know how much I owe, how in the world would I ever know?  This, after going through several clueless billing clerks, who all had different answers.

Then there’s the diabolical system AT&T pioneered, called “the Loop,” under which customer service associates will never give out their last names or their locations, thus assuring that one can never reach the same person twice.  One call might be answered in Hong Kong, the next in Miami, the third in Mumbai.  In other words, every time one calls about an issue (and multiple calls will always be needed), one has to go over the same information, from the beginning.  They’re betting people will get frustrated and give up.  In my experience, only the word, “lawyer,” will elicit any real assistance.  Maybe.

I’m using this long rant with personal anecdotes to illustrate my contention in this post:  customer service has died a horrible death in this country.  The larger companies and bureaucracies have grown, the more diversified their customer service has become.  Read:  it’s outsourced to remote workers, many of them very remote.  As in, English-as-a-second-language remote.  My guess is that a large percentage of these people in call centers absolutely don’t want to be doing what they’re doing.  Moreover, the protocols put in place by their employers are so completely dysfunctional, so entirely antithetical to actual customer service, the call center drudges must constantly suffer the brunt of customers’ anger.  They read from scripts, and that’s all they know.  They have no idea how any of the processes work, they have only minimal acquaintance with the software they use, and by the time they’ve been in their jobs a week, they truly never want to speak with another human being again.  They’re surely not empowered to execute any action not in the scripts, either, which only adds to the frustration all around.  In the case of government offices, they’re massively understaffed, so staff are grossly overworked, and by the time a customer has been waiting four-and-a-half hours to reach an agent, they absolutely don’t want to hear it.  I envision three people sitting at desks in each niche office, trying to serve the entire state.  Maybe one person for county offices. 

My thought is, what happens to people who don’t have time to sit on hold for literally hours?  What about people who don’t have a lot of experience with bureaucracy and red tape, and so aren’t prepared with which questions to ask and how to follow up?  After all, the frazzled people seeking assistance are quite literally a captive audience.  What can they do, if they must reach someone to get what they need?  I read that, in connection with one of the provisions of the recent debt limit deal, there will be changes to SNAP and TANF benefits.  Apparently, the Rethuglicans are actually counting on attrition in those programs, due to failure to file updated paperwork and the sheer inability to keep up with the new parameters.  Again, people who are already scrambling to put food on the table [surprise!] simply can’t just take X amount of their working days to deal with paperwork requirements.  What a nice bonus for the GOP. 

Thus far, I’ve only talked about calling in to offices, with little hope of reaching a person within one working day, and, when a person finally picks up the call, he/she has no information or gives out incorrect information.  The trend in in-person customer service is equally ugly.

It’s exponentially worse since the pandemic began, but it had been spiraling down for a good twenty years before that.  Only in top-notch restaurants is attentive, personable service a requirement.  In 95% of establishments, it’s strictly hit and miss.  Much has been written in the past couple years about the working conditions in hospitality.  Conditions were poor before the pandemic, but exposés about them were few and far between.  Now, such pieces are more common, as a way of explaining why servers and hotel/restaurant staff are very hard to come by.  Since 2020, I can count on one hand the number of adequately-staffed restaurants I’ve visited, and have a finger or two left over.  Considering that we eat out fairly frequently, at a wide range of establishments across the northern part of the state, that’s a lot of restaurants to compare.  If it’s an Applebee’s, forget it.  They’re usually short at least two servers per shift, no matter where the place is.  And judging by the long wait times for food, kitchen staff is seriously lacking, as well.  I know this from working both front- and back-of-the-house positions for years.  We went to a winery last month, and it took 40 minutes to get a small, three-item cheese plate, with three other tables in the room.  We overheard a bartender tell another [impatient] couple that if someone happens to call in for service hours or something, they automatically advise the caller not to bother to come in, if they’re expecting, say, a bus group.  This particular venue is the best-known, most-advertised of its kind in the area.  Go figure.

If attitude is everything when it comes to customer service, write the epitaph.  With the brutal conditions, low pay, and often nonexistent benefits, who’s going to take service jobs?  You’d have to really love your fellow man and woman to willingly endure such hardship.  Logically, then, service workers these days take the jobs out of necessity.  When it comes to restaurant work, there’s the hope of tips, of course, but that’s all it is:  a hope.  The result is that such jobs are filled with desperate people, slogging through their days because….paycheck, however small it might be.  The number of individuals who can maintain a positive attitude through those days is becoming vanishingly miniscule.  Again, I’d cite restaurant servers.  Lack of staff means longer waits to be seated (no point in putting people at a table if no one can serve them); longer waits for preliminary service; longer waits for food to appear (lack of kitchen staff).  In short, not great experiences for customers, by and large.  Most customers don’t know what goes on behind the scenes, so the servers get the brunt of the dissatisfaction.  And here I’ll put in a word about training:  owners are hiring warm bodies, period.  It’s frequently obvious that the servers waiting on us have had no basic restaurant training, such as how to work efficiently.  They’re making extra trips, forgetting things, and generally missing opportunities to lighten their loads.  Owners don’t care, of course, but that lack of training is also a factor in increasing dissatisfaction for both customers and staff. 

Hosts/hostesses are in the lower echelon in restaurants, on a level with bus people.  Owners overlook the fact that they’re the faces of establishments, which is a really dumb oversight.  A smiling, friendly hostess can set the tone for a visit, and possibly offset some later drawbacks.  Many seaters don’t receive shares of tips, and they’re universally low-paid, when giving them a bit more can increase customer satisfaction by orders of magnitude.  Seeing the first person one encounters dragging around the dining room, moving as slowly as possible, completely expressionless, not looking at anyone or greeting customers….duh.  When I recently complimented a sour-faced young hostess about her beautiful nails, she just muttered, “Yeah,” and trudged away without looking at me.  Translation:  she’s desperate, the hiring manager is desperate.  Not a good look, not a way to start a visit---because any subsequent glitches are compounded---and not an enticement to return.

The contrasts to all of the above instances serve to underscore how important and effective great customer service can be.  As one example, I’ve read that the Kroger chain has a standard of friendliness and good service.  I can’t speak for other stores, but the one we go to in northwest Ohio has the most consistently helpful, personable, courteous employees I’ve ever encountered anywhere in all of our travels.  When a stock person asks if I need help finding something, and then physically leads me to the item, and a cashier simply asks, with a smile, “How’s your day going?” and then smiles again at my reply, it makes my day.  Our local Costco is the same.  It’s a stark example of how offering higher wages and treating people better (their break room is a wonder) actually does pay off in the long run.  Happy customers equals returning customers.  It’s the simplest of equations.

How did we get so far away from that?  How do these gigantic companies not realize how important the basic, pleasant interactions are?  I guess when a handful of entities owns a huge majority of all U.S. commerce, they don’t have to care.

What are your tales of woe, readers??