Waiting in a telephone queue
In my mind, one of the worst possible experiences is having to wait in a telephone queue. I’m sure that I’m not alone—I can imagine that most of us have had an hour or two of an afternoon here and there sucked away by this horrible invention. There’s nothing worse than trying to take five minutes away from work to make a quick call to sort out your bank statement or renew your telephone plan and then getting stuck in a queue. What makes it even worse is that the phone queue isn’t even the beginning of the process. No, the phone queue is usually arrived at after having had to type in your username, phone number, PIN, mother’s maiden name, and having to recite Pi to fourteen thousand digits. Only then, after all of that, and after screaming ’operator’ hopelessly into the phone half a dozen times, do you get placed into a queue. Who came up with the idea of the telephone queue? How is it helpful for your customers to make them sit in line for hours while setting up a recorded voice to tell them how important they are to your organization or business? Why not just take their number and just call them back? Why not just hire enough staff to deal with these phone calls in the first place? Surely, if your customers were really as important to you as you like to say, you’d realize that they’re the ones keeping you in business, and that perhaps you should look after them. No one likes wasting their afternoon listening to tinny music that keeps being interrupted by irritating voiceovers about your company and how much you love your customers. If this were really the case, as you seem to say it is, you’d put some of the money we pay you to good use, and hire someone to help us out when we most need it, rather than treating us like the numbers we apparently are.
In other news, something else that really really bothers me is when people put down a good businesses name to a) get money out of them, or b) because they had one sort of bad experience with them. I think this is possibley the worst thing that the internet has let us do! My friend has found a couple of companies that have both received bad reviews and has written a WHOLE PAGE in her blog about it. You can check it out on the Enigin page!