As a Brit, we have many preconceived ideas about the U.S. Many of those ideas come from 7o’s & 80’s TV shows, like Starskey & Hutch, The Street’s Of San Fransisco, and Magnum (PI). Much in the same way that American’s believe from British TV that the we all live in Palaces, drive Jaguar E-Type’s and make phone calls from red telephone boxes.
One of the biggest preconceived ideas we have is that America is the land of customer service, where the customer is King and is always right. Right?
No it isn’t.
In fact we have experienced some of the worst customer service here in Missouri than we have anywhere in the World; and given we have lived in Spain and South Africa, this is quite an achievement.
We ordered a large L shaped sofa from IKEA several weeks before we were due to move into our house. Order confirmation was all good, and the delivery date was set. But on delivery day, all that arrived were the cusion and sofa covers: no sofa. IKEA Customer Service seemed nonchalant: “maybe it has got lost in the warehouse” (how do you lose a sofa?), “we have to order another one”, and this would take two weeks (assuming it also didn’t wander off, perhaps to join the other sofa. Maybe there are gangs of IKEA sofa’s roaming the highways of the U.S., pouncing on passers by, threatening them with complicated assembly instructions and ultimately, missing parts).
When I asked where our family were supposed to sit until then, the Customer Service advisor simply repeated what she had already told me, as if I hadn’t heard the first time. She clearly had someone more interesting to talk to.
Just as with IKEA, we had been smugly efficient in ordering our internet service from Spectrum well in advance. Spectrum were ‘delighted’ to inform us that internet was connected to our house with another provider (AT&T), and it was a simple ‘switch over’. Odd how the word ‘simple’ seems to have a completely different meaning for me than from the dictionary definition.
So when the Spectrum engineer arrived, he clearly hadn't received the memo on simplicity. In order to provide internet, they would have to run a cable from here to there, or somewhere, and certainly under the driveway, but it was a ‘simple’ job (there’s that word again). This he proudly announced as if he were doing us a great service, would have to be done by a ‘specialist’ team (what was he if not a specialist?), and that would be the next day!
So that ‘team’ — consisting of one — arrived the next day, but he didn’t get the memo on being a ‘specialist’ either. “I don’t have the equipment, and the current booking time is two weeks” he said humourlessly, perhaps expecting an entirely different reaction from me than the one he received.
Now by this time we had already had to put up with our two teenage children throwing obscenities and large objects at us because we had no internet. As any parent knows, Face chat and Insta Web are far more important to teenagers than air. So we politely, and in a very British manner told Spectrum to ‘get lost’, and called in AT&T, and within a few days our children were once again happily sucking the internet like tech vampires. All be it at considerably less speeds than offered by Spectrum.
Coming to the U.S., we decided for our cars at least, that we would stay staunchly European and buy BMW— the Bayerische Motoren Werke, or in English, Bavarian Motor Works — which are after all exceptionally well engineered machines, manufactured by Germans. However, they are assembled here in South Carolina. And that was a bit of a worry given that our preconceptions were that Americans don’t make very good cars.
Our brand new ‘build to order’ BMW — which by the way, seemed to take as long to order at the dealership as it would to have Spectrum internet installed — has now been in the workshop 51 days out of 150 due to issues with build quality. Every time the car has come back to us, work has either been done badly — linings hanging out, loose bolts lying on the floor, sun roof not fitting — or not at all.
BMW — Designed and engineered by Germans; assembled by Americans.
The most frustrating thing about customer service in the U.S. is that everyone begins the conversation with “Today I am going to exceed your expectations”. They do; just not in the way we expected.
