Customer Service Experience Part 2

With the world growing smaller and smaller and with the mobility of our labour force we are using services that are not in the same country that we reside in and without the expected results.

I have had a recent problem with my web site. And of course my host is not in Australia. I found that with customer service it is better to avoid talking to customer service reps (After Sales Service…) so it is much easier to use email as you will get an answer you can follow and also avoiding accents, I am slightly tonal deaf so I have trouble understanding sometimes.

I could not get access to my website. My mistake I actually rang the help desk, ha! I hung up feeling without any satisfaction from their answer. It was, “We can see it, so it must be your ISP”. I fiddle around with the computer and find something called trace route, this looks good. It shows that it gets all the way out of Australia and into the secondary country then to the host and then times out and goes somewhere else.

I send these details to help desk to generate a ticket number. I get a reply, “we can see it and says that it is going through our server, please print the error message you are receiving”. I mean you know the error message you get from IE, “Internet Explorer cannot access the page”! I send and get no reply. I speak to my ISP and send another note with another trace route attached. No response. I go next door as they have a different ISP and cannot access website and send another note. After my initial call, 8 notes and 20 hours later, I received a response “due to the complexity of the problem, it has been relayed to our advance technically team”. Another 5 hours later, “Service will return to normal as soon as possible. Unfortunately, we are unable to give a specific time frame for this resolution… Due to history of this ticket we are offering you the opportunity to be called directly…”

Over 36 hours later I finally have access to my website. I do take up their offer of a phone call because I want to understand what happened so it does not occur again. The customer service rep starts going through all the times and the notes I had sent to them. What is the point of that? I know what I sent to them and when, I had a very frustrating day trying to get through to them. Then he says it was a server issue. I know that, I knew from the beginning. But what was the issue? He starts again, repeating details I already knew and already repeated. He would not stop. I had to rudely interrupt him as I did not want to hear the same thing again. I asked him what was the issue with the server? He starts repeating again. “There was an issue with the server”. Yeah, but what? “There was an issue with the server”.

What is the point of offering a customer a call when they are just going to irritate the customer by telling them that they had a frustrating day and no answer to the question asked?

And then, “Is there anything else I can help you with, ma’am?” No.