The refrigerator’s ice machine stopped working. Bob called customer service to get help. The customer service department is located in a country where English is not the primary language. I have no objection to this as long as the person can speak English. Bob’s Customer Service agent was incapable of understanding what he needed and botched the information that Bob gave him. In order for the agent to understand the problem, Bob was forced into a back and forth where Bob corrected the agent’s frequent misunderstandings of what Bob was saying but Bob stuck with him in the hope that the agent would eventually get it right. Unfortunately, the Customer Service Rep got it wrong which required a second phone call to clarify the details. All which Bob had given in the previous call. A service call was arranged for a week down the road.

The refrigerator is brand new. Someone probably accidentally touched the wrong button and the ice machine got turned off. A service person will push the button and all will be good. The problem is that it took numerous phone calls, long waits for available Customer Service Reps, call backs and a long wait for service people. All this work, which will probably be resolved by a service person pushing the right button, in order for the ice machine to deliver ice. This is not good customer service.

Bad customer service doesn’t seem to trouble most companies. My eyes were opened to this twenty years ago when I had a friend who managed a customer service department. She didn’t have enough staff. This meant that anybody who called in had to wait in a queue, sometimes for longer than an hour, to actually talk to a Customer Service Rep. It got so bad that the corporate heads decided that a certain percentage of callers would get a busy signal. They weren’t even given the opportunity to wait for over an hour to speak to someone. They were just told to call back later. Now if management was getting more staff, a call back later might sound like a good option. But management had no intention of getting more staff. All they were offering was calling back at a later time to wait in a long queue or to be ignored. I repeat this is not good customer service.

Customer Service departments are almost always dealing with problems with the product or the service. Customer Service Reps are supposed to solve the problem and rescue the companies good name with the customer by doing so. This, at least in theory, is the whole reason for Customer Service departments. What we are getting now are long waits in phone queues, busy signals and a long conversation with someone who has difficulty even understanding what you’re saying. This shows you how interested companies are in resolving your problem. Not much.