If there's one thing I can't stand, it's being unfairly treated by a utilities or services provider. Why? Because I am confronted with the maddening maze of (alleged) customer service with call centres worldwide, otherwise known as The Faceless Other and brings out my enraged alter ego, Incredibly Pissed Off.
This weeks offender? Virgin Media: how I can't stand you (my words, but something of a secret motto of theirs right back at the customer too).
They stand guilty of not having any other means of contact outside of speaking on the phone, forcing you into a stand-off with staff who glibly possess a fragile grasp on the meaning of 'customer' and 'service'. The worst part is that this process involves a fair amount of trust on the part of the customer, and it's the ease in which a CS or Collections rep can abuse this trust which triggered the emergence of my IPO self. By trust, I mean the faithful record of a call and the write up of notes summarising the main points of the call on a persons account. This is the least I expect if I'm going to speak to Sundeep in Mumbai's frontline call centre, forwarded to Stacey in a Bolton pod, then to Sunni in Birmingham (let's call him Dick Wad) and then back again to Another Chap at the same B/ham centre, in an annoying, unproductive daisy chain. I never considered the absurdity in how business calls have become a human telefonic version of the pass-the-parcel childs game. Rather, Pass the Buck- Quick!
Call centres are supposed to make customer service seamless; smooth. The end of one call, and the start to another like passing on a baton of information: "Ah, Miss G, I see you called in about that last week"...Instead, this Virgin Media brigade are a dislocated, truncated and downright renegade service on a global scale- literally. One call can involve at least two transfers like Poirot making unplanned pit stops on The Orient en route from Instanbul (Murder on the Orient). Each agent in each transfer screens for the exact same information as the last, before telling you, "Sorry, wrong department. On yer merry way to Scotland, Hercule!".
Suffice to say, my original complaint is yet to be resolved. We'll see if the unfortunate manager at B/ham's Faceless Other centre honours their 24 hr callback policy that I requested within the first ten seconds of conversation with Dick Wad Sunni, who naively argued that "my colleagues will say the same thing as me". Oddly enough, it brought an odd satisfaction and some restoration to order hearing him say that. You know you've hit that nerve of powerlessness when a CS rep says that- the faint hope that this pesky woman will go away and accept my words, stinks out the air like a putrid possum fart.
Let the battle commence...
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