Clark Howard labels this disturbing trend “customer no service”, Ron Kaufman says don’t book travel online, use a travel agent, after he spent 30 minutes on hold trying to reach expedia only to go book a $9000 vacation with a travel agent. I’ve complained several times on my radio show about how fast food is more about being fast than food. A district manager for the Wendys food chain told me that this was what they strived for: get folks in and out fast through the drive-thru. I asked him about accuracy in the orders and that didn’t seem to be a real high priority. I explained that it doesn’t matter how fast the food is if the order isn’t correct. He wasn’t real nice, and we haven’t taken our family back there since. We used to go on average two times a week and spend on average $20 each visit. Wendys loss, not ours.

I’m a bonafide tech geek, I love new technology and the concept of using machines to automate repetitive tasks, but I will be the first to say that in business there are some places where machines have absolutely no place.

Here’s one: automated customer support phone systems. Has anybody here ever tried to call companies like SprintPCS or ATNT? It’s an adventure getting through to a human! Really, it is, and they are a phone company! Why would a phone company have a computer answer the phone? These things count against our cell phone minutes … imagine that? To get to a human you have to go through the cycle with machines like this and write the code map to bypass all the messages. That’s not customer support, that’s sending a rat through a maze in search of cheese. And what about those irritating automated hold messages where the time is rarely accurate? “You’re anticipated hold time is 10 minutes” … and then in 15 minutes later it says, “your anticipated hold time is 5 minutes” Who wrote this software?

As mentioned above: fast food timers! Why? When I worked at KFC as a manager some 17 years ago I learned that employees discovered how to put a sheet pan in front of the timer to essentially cheat the system. Do you think that every fast food restaurant on the planet hasn’t figured out some way to bypass those timers? So why use them as a benchmark? They are ok for giving employees a general idea of how quickly orders are being processed, but if the emphasis is on getting those orders out the door as fast as possible, accuracy of orders be damned, then there is something seriously wrong with the fast food industry.

If you have customer service tech horror stories in any industry, please use the comment or trackback me to your blog so I can read about them. I know I’m not alone.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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