It seems like every time I call my cell phone company I have to spend an hour on the phone just to make simple changes, which half the time end up getting screwed up in the process. Is there anything I can do to up my chances of getting what I want?
Basically, you’re screwed. It’s best to start any interaction with your carrier’s customer service department keeping this simple mantra in mind: I am worth nothing to my carrier, and I’m lucky they’ll have me.
Read the rest after the jump.
Okay, so maybe that’s too pessimistic. There are, actually, quite a few things you can do to improve your experience with customer service, and while some of them should seem obvious, there might be a few that escaped you as you furiously dialed that 800 number with your fucked up monthly bill in hand.
First of all, you need to understand how most customer service organizations are set up. The people you first reach on the phone are the grunts, the cannon fodder. They are usually poorly trained, may or may not have a decent command of English, and really couldn’t care less about your satisfaction. Their main purpose is to soak the damage from the thousands of angry customers calling each day and not to solve any problems. While this isn’t the case in every single company, as a general rule, that’s who you’re dealing with when someone first picks up the phone.
You did hit zero when first dialing, too, didn’t you? That’s usually a quick way to bypass all the menus and get to a human operator, which should be your first goal. *
Now you might think your goal from here is to talk to a manager. This is a mistake — the manager of the grunts is more than likely a recently promoted grunt, as well, who made the post by remaining employed for more than 6 months. Your goal is actually to get to the well-trained strike team that actually considers customer service a real job, and the quickest way to get there is not to navigate the labyrinth of menus but to be directly transferred there by another human operator, who usually can drop you directly into the right office’s phone queue.
And really, that’s the trick, 90% of the time — getting to the right department. Unless, of course, they just direct you to a random other department to get you off their line and keep their call time down. Not much you can do about that, unfortunately.
The other half of it is really all attitude. Know what you want — and the days of getting a bunch of free concessions from your company are, in general, over — and calmly and firmly press for it until you get it. You’ll find the more experienced and professional the customer service department, the faster they’ll meet your needs. And rarely, if even, can something not be done because “we aren’t allowed to do that.” Customer service is a highly regulated, highly regimented department, but they can bend the rules like anyone else, if they think they have to.
* Occasionally, you’ll be better served using the voice menus, but in general most of us want to speak to a human.
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