Surviving Customer Services (Part 3)

Pipex were prompt. I can’t fault them on that. Email had turned out to be much the same option as Southend pier. They can’t accept queries by email (along with semaphore and deliveries by donkey) and could I log a case via their web page? There was a definite rumbling in the grumble magma, like someone had given Vesuvius indigestion, but this is the internet age, so I do just that, copying and pasting my previous email into their web-form, answering those sixteen pointless questions that are the online equivalent of whatever booby traps that Indiana Jones must face to retrieve the fabulous golden turds of the Aztec hyena, and provide every detail about myself short of my inside leg measurements and a psychological profile. The following day I am rewarded by a response. Can I provide my details so they can locate my account and prove it’s me and not someone else trying to correct my terms of service (if so, where can I find this generous individual and thank them)? Well, of course I can I re-input the information, it’s the same information I had to provide in order to submit the case the day before. They’re making it easy for me, I can copy and paste. I’m a child of the Internet age. I see light at the end of the tunnel, I shall soon be untied and freed from my download limit bondage.

Not yet though, the next message from Pipex says "sorry, you’ll need to contact TalkTalk customer support to discuss this, it’s such privileged information that we’d be executed and our families shipped to Siberia if we so much as even gleaned even the slightest knowledge of your predicament. Please don’t say another word, think of our families!”. Can they forward it, I mean I am a Pipex customer after all? No. That would be tantamount to knowledge that the problem exists and the death squads would be upon them, crashing through the skylights and tasering their first born. Could I stand the guilt of that? Well, if you do ask, I could. OK, OK, rather than build a giant death tractor and drive it through the front doors of their HQ and embarking on an orgy of farm machinery related destruction not bettered since the Tobe Hooper-directed remake of Animal Farm (“piggy’s gonna squeal”), I’ll try once more with the more reasonable route.

The drill is familiar. I copy and paste the complaint into TalkTalk’s web-form, answer the sixteen challenges of doom, add my psychological assessment and click submit. The next day, my inbox pings (it does literally), and “can I provide…" Of course I can, I gibber, feeling the magma start to kick like a volcanic baby. I am the copy-and-paste ninja! So that verify that I am in fact me. And that I’m not a TalkTalk customer. The rumbling grows ominous now. I so want my death tractor.

No worries though, it didn’t really matter as they can’t deal with the query anyway. See, I’m with the wrong kind of customer service, I need the other kind of customer service.  Why don’t I instead call their ‘Customer Retention’ line? I can have them sort out there own problem and I can pay them to do so. See that: their problem, my money, it’s genius. Well, it’s a bargain, I’m sure sex lines and casinos in Monaco are far more expensive ways to amuse yourself.

Except I’ve already written a single paragraph that perfectly and precisely states the issue. It’s a small package of neatly wrapped explanatory perfection. It’s lean, mean and to the point. It would not benefit from being yelled down the phone at some distant village idiot. It’s not debatable or arguable, and I feel no great urge to discuss it (beyond the 2,000 words or so I’ve already written on the subject). So, TalkTalk, rather than me waste more of my time by forcing me to invent a time machine and zap myself back to the beginning, why don’t you just unblock the damn process and pass along my query to your Retentions Team? I mean, you are a telecommunications provider, after all. Telecommunicate!

This cannot be done. TalkTalk have taken the game of outsourcing to an entire new level by locating their customer services team outside the realm of normal time and space. They are apparently tucked away into a cul-de-sac of space-time where normal communications simply cannot work. They have taken the underlying brane of the universe and tightly wrapped their customers services team like an impregnable christmas present designed to delight and then drive the recipient to despair, as they lose their fingernails and are generally reduced to screaming like they’ve found themselves starring in Saw XVIII. From within their fold in the fabric of the universe they can’t email or phone, or otherwise contact the retention team. Even if I attached giant plasmas drives to the death tractor, it couldn’t get inside.

The BT Subscriber's Complaint Resolves Itself

It’s not all bad though. We’re not in a one-sided, abusive relationship here. They’re willing to give a little back. For instance, I get access to thousands of X-Factor tickets. On hearing this, I was stuck with the grim knowledge that all those years ago I may have pressed the wrong button and ordered an unlimited broadband service when, all the time, I had intended to order the tickets to an experience I would anticipate is akin to gouging out my own eyeballs with a rusty ice cream scoop while being fucked in each ear by two horny donkeys on Viagra. We all make mistakes online, and some can’t be undone by deleting your browser cache and immersing your computer in undiluted bleach.

Of course, the aim is to survive. To not be beaten by the system. It’s easy to let the grumble magma erupt, fling fury into the sky. But in land without ready access to a surfeit of firearms, what’s the point. Death tractors probably require expensive modifications. You can’t just tint the windows and hope no one notices. Take a breath, let the magma cool. All is not done.

No, there’s an opportunity here to volley this case back and forth in a childish game of “please pass this on,” “I can’t”, “well, I’m not”, “but we don’t…” and just see how long it takes. It’s day three now. They’ve done the impossible though. I sudden have a rosy recollection of many happy days talking to BT Customer Services. I can’t remember what went wrong between us.

Surviving Customer Services (Part 2)

Now modern customer services has taught us urban survivors a thing or two about self-sufficiency. Place any modern day survivor in the control room of a nuclear reactor steaming towards meltdown with nothing other than the wrong type of spanner and phone labelled ‘customer services’ you know we’ll be down in the reactor core vigorously hammering away at the containment shell like we're auditioning to join the Muppets as Animal's replacement. Really, just anything other than call that number. By dialling, not only are launching yourself onto the cruel seas of misunderstanding, you are also admitting defeat. Now it’t not so bad to reach out for help if it’s you’re standing next to a nuclear reactor that’s boiling like a kettle filled with minestrone soup and is about to turn western Europe’s entire sheep population into an all-conquering army of irradiated Leo Sayers. Less good if you’re missing a screw for your Sukva table and chair set.

Reaching out to customer services is not like asking a grown-up, it’s like asking a grown-up who eats half-gnawed hunks of saliva-sauced KFC out of the bins behind the bus shelter and washes it down with Chateau White Lightening to help your solve quadratic equations.

It has to happen though. Sometimes we’re tossed powerlessly about like a seasick landlubber by events and circumstance. Take the other day as an example. Now, I am connected to the Internets via a tautened length of Victorian-era string, and have my broadband delivered by a company called Pipex. The grand corporate machinations of acquisitions-and-mergers have been turning in the meantime and now Pipex is TalkTalk. Which, I’m sure is utterly super and may the managers of TalkTalk be blessed for their successful acquisition with a magic dog that shits gold bullion, but I just wish they would stop telling me about it, and how absolutely wonderful it be for me. I’m really not as excited about it as they are, babbling away like teenage lovers. Little do they know their relationship won’t stay like that. There’s disillusion, gradual contempt, hate, and thrown crockery somewhere in their future, they just don’t know it yet. And divorce battle of over the magic dog that shits gold bullion will dwarf even that petty scrap at the end of the Lord of the Rings trilogy (you know, 264 hours in).

Now there is one thing about my broadband service that’s important to note: it’s called ‘Pipex Xtreme’ –  which proudly declared itself 'unlimited'. Now had assumed that didn’t mean unlimited Pipexes, delighful though they sound, but rather unlimited broadband. As many bytes as could squeeze through my skinny little phone line, like stuffing an elephant down a snake and then ordering it dessert.

So, when TalkTalk cunningly slip a distinctly not-unlimited 40 GB/month cap into the smaller print of a letter headed “A Small Change to Your Direct Debit” rather than “HA, YOUR BROADBAND IS NOW UN-UNLIMITED, SUCK ON THAT! (Oh and by the way, we’re taking your money and using it to buy our boss a dog that shits gold bullion)” I feel a slight build-up of what is best called grumble magma. Not enough to erupt, but enough to set the green ink needle wobbling on nearby seismographs. It was late at night, so I located the customer services email of Pipex and sent my uncommonly reasoned response to mildly demand that they return my broadband back to its full, unrestrained glory. Now, I’ve only dealt with Pipex’s attempts at customer services once before, and it didn’t disappoint.  Admittedly, I had set my expectations lower the a midget limbo dancer's world record attempt bar. And sadly it was too late to take more effective path of writing the message on a piece of paper, stuffing it in a bottle, and then taking  the train to Southend to fling it from the end of the pier. Instead I was forced to send it thrumming down that piece of antique telecommunications string.

I anticipated a quick and simple solution to my problem...

Surviving Customer Services (Part 1)

Once upon a time, when you needed customer service, you turned up at the business in question, found your way to the special office dedicated to just that, and pinged a bell on counter. One harmonious, self-important moment later someone would pop out of the back office to provide you with the kind of service that a customer could expect. The person behind the counter didn’t pretend that you had suddenly become invisible. He or she didn’t put on a funny accent and claim you weren’t speaking English. They didn’t start screaming at you like you had developed a third eye, horns, a reddish skin complexion and threatened to consume their firstborn children in some blood-curdling demon orgy, when all you had really asked was if you could get a refund on a jar of mouldy raspberry jam.

Of course, this good, solid kind of customer service was magical in that way that things remembered are, untempered by any kind of reality (and as such the world that Daily Mail readers still live in). You forget the wait time that stretched back into the dark ages and you’d be joining behind someone with the black death and that these desks were staffed by pustulant ogres who could burp the stench of Satan’s recently filled shit-can as though they had eaten garlic pickled dead babies for lunch. But these were the good old days when the world was rendered in black and white, slavery was OK, and World Wars were the character-building equivalent of gap years for the nation’s youth. Like it still is for Daily Mail readers.

Times have been a changing though. Firstly, there came the Internet, a magical system of global electronic spaghetti invented by men looking for a viable alternative to buying their porn from the newsagent (usually best sandwiched between two slices of semi-respectable newspapers). And for those who couldn’t reach the heights of the top shelf, the only other option was to spend their time smut-foraging in road-side hedgerows and verges like hungry foxes in search of the pornographic equivalent of a half-eaten Ginster's pasty. It’s no wonder several collective pulsating, febrile tonnes of male brain worked together to achieve such a marvel of modern communications technology.

Despite the humble aims of the internet, it redefined the world as we know it. We can now squeeze our entire lives through a wire, in the same way as forcing an whole pig through an industrial sausage machine produces budget-friendly strings of reprocessed meat products The outside is that place glimpsed over the top of your glowing monitor, somewhere that makes your eyes feel slightly nervous, like middle-aged men caught outside a school at going-home time. It also created an opportunity. A devilishly brilliant opportunity that Satan himself wished he had patented. Outsourcing. Why not farm out your service operations to dim-and-distant places no one had previously heard about, such as Kirkcaldy and Hyderabad, and effectively any other place where the likelihood of your being understood is low-to-negligible. This lack of communication is instantly useful, since they may well be solving your problem or making it worse, you simply can’t possibly know, which reduces your number of avenues for complaint. Of course, you know you’d get the same responses from them if you composed entire sentences solely out of the words ‘pork pie’ and shouted them down the phone, like a madman in Greggs.

Now, in 2011, Apple can invent a phone that understands you. Even if you shout “pork pie” at it, it remains unfazed, and probably gives you directions to Melton Mowbray. It’s a phone that could get more GCSEs than the average schoolchild and can tell the capitals of countries you can’t even spell. Yet customer services provides a working home for a mutual lack of understanding. They don’t understand you. You don’t understand them. And to be fair, they don’t even understand themselves. It’s like everyones caught a virulent brain disease that makes them shout in Klingon at each other for several minutes before the unstoppable urge to munch brains takes over and puts a finally bloody full stop to it all.

To be continued...