Save the Unusual Request
I just turned 23 so I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a grown up and one thing I’ve realized is that you have to make a lot of phone calls.
I had to call my doctor’s office a few weeks ago to set up an appointment to discuss changing one of the medications I’m on — a task which proved particularly difficult because this would be my first appointment not with the doctor I’ve seen since I was a toddler. (It’s hard not to view being unceremoniously dropped by one’s pediatrician as an unmistakable sign of adulthood.) A few years ago, my HMO set up a website where tasks like making appointments and getting medical records and test results could be done without the hassle of interpersonal contact, but for the odd task that their web interface didn’t let me do myself, I had to call their office, like it’s 2003 or something, and confer with a human.
I don’t know a lot about economics, but I’m pretty sure that the customer service industry is shrinking really quickly. This month alone, Sprint laid off 2,000 customer service employees, Macy’s announced plans to close one of its four customer service centers, and Xerox and VMware both cut a number of jobs jobs including — yep — customer service workers. That’s just from the first couple pages of a Google News search for “customer service employee layoffs.”
When I called my doctor’s office, I explained my situation — that because I was no longer a concern of the pediatrics department, that I would like to pick a new doctor and schedule an appointment with them.
“Just one second, sir, let me put you on a brief hold while I check appointment availability.”
I waited on hold for thirty five minutes. I listened to the same terrible music over and over and over and over. I texted my father, one of several adult role-models in my life to whom I turn when I don’t know what to do.
“Should this take so long?” I asked.
“Nope, that’s odd. You should call back.”
I’m pretty sure they just kind of forgot I was there.
Another thing that sucks about being a grown up is shit breaks all the time, and you need fix it. At least, I do, because things I own being broken stresses me out like nothing else. Chalk it up to one of a few neuroses that lead me to become a designer. My beautifully impractical convertible has a leak in its roof because that’s what happens to 12-year-old convertibles, but I knew the very thing to mend it was a dab of Sugru. I had really wanted to put it on that day, too, because there was a torrential downpour and I haven’t yet figured out how to summon a rainstorm on command, so I set out to find some so I could quickly test if the fix had worked.
I wanna take a minute to hype Sugru because (I swear they’re not paying me to say this) I’ll be fucked if it’s not the duct tape of the 21st century. It’s this putty that you mold and it sticks to almost anything and hardens to hold its shape perfectly. That shit fixes everything and is criminally unavailable in any brick and mortar establishment. Home Depot, which should sell such things, doesn’t. Nor do any arts and crafts stores in Atlanta, nor does Best Buy or any of the three Radio Shacks still open inside the perimeter, but lo and behold! Target’s website assured me that they had three varieties of Sugru in their store closest to me. I called just to make extra-sure they had some in stock.
“Let me check on that, may I place you on a brief hold?”
Having waited longer than it would’ve taken to drive over, I did, all the while water soaking through my sleeve, only to find that Sugru wasn’t. Fucking. In stock.
It’s cool that we’re living in a time where life’s menial tasks — waiting to speak to a receptionist, going to a store to buy things — are being replaced by web interfaces and services like Google Express and Prime Now but sometimes, apparently, life throws circumstances at you which (not to sound like my father) computers just haven’t solved yet. Customer service agents work in departments whose resources are no doubt dwindling by the week, and as a customer often in need of service, the impact is totally evident. It takes longer and longer to speak to someone and the fundamental, arguably uncomplicated goal of talking to a person has become this holy grail of bureaucracy.
I have one last story which actually details an amazing support experience that I think I have to talk about too, mostly because it was brought on by a bout of anecdotally unprecedented incompetence in the customer service sector. Over Thanksgiving, my mom found herself in the market for a new phone, and Best Buy had a deal where they would give you a little bit more money than usual towards the purchase of a new phone if you traded in your old one. I went with her to Best Buy because I’m a loving son and I know how much she hates what she calls “odious tasks,” such as buying a new phone. But I wound up going off and doing something else with other family members, as often happens over Thanksgiving vacations, once it seemed like she was in good hands. After I left, the Man who Works for Best Buy gave my mother a new phone and took her old one as per the terms of the deal, but forgot to deactivate her old phone.
It’s something that my mother shouldn’t be required to know that you absolutely have to do, and something that a Best Buy employee shouldn’t be allowed to forget. Yeah, it’s an understandable mistake, but it nevertheless left my mother without a phone that could reliably send and receive text messages for about a week. That week also happened to be a week where some shit was going down at her work, and she really wanted to be sending and receiving text messages about it. It took me a few days to figure out what had gone wrong after spending many, many hours talking to both Apple and Verizon support agents, online and over the phone, and after driving to Best Buy to see if by some miracle they still had the phone (they weren’t picking up theirs) — they didn’t — we went back home and called Apple yet again, because there was no way something like this could happen irreparably. This time, they put me through to the tech support agent of my dreams. His name was Scott Wolff, he’s a senior advisor for AppleCare, and he gave me his cellphone number because that’s how good of friends we were by the end. He also initiated a call between me, himself, and a Verizon tech support agent — my first threesome! They were able to figure out how to undo whatever the Best Buy employee hadn’t done…something involving their IMEI database…long story short, mom’s phone worked after a reset.
I don’t know if I have a perfect solution to the conundrum that is tech support. On one hand, surely the majority of the queries they receive are routine, and can be handled well enough by web interfaces (or, y’know, googling a vague description of the problem). But hard-to-solve problems are often, I find, the most exciting ones, and companies should care more about identifying, solving, and in the long term, maybe even automating them into obsolescence. Until such a day comes, though, call centers should have more people like Scott; people with the power to do things without following the book — things that there isn’t a book about. They should hire and train people who care about the product they’re helping people with, like I could tell Scott did; who know the product inside and out; who obsess over finding and ironing out problems. Especially the problems that seem like there’s no fix in the world. (Obviously, not every agent can or should be held to such a standard, but there need to be more of them around, and they need to be accessible.) Someone else should be able to figure out that maybe Best Buy forgot to shut off my mom’s phone, because what if she didn’t have me to? There are, I imagine, droves of people out there, lives full of inexplicable problems. They keep me up at night like zombies, moaning, “I keep getting this weird message.” As more tasks, odious and otherwise, become automated, these sorts of inexplicable problems and indecipherable error messages are unforgivable. Customer service centers should be maintained at any cost, because the only thing I can think of that’s worse than having to wait on hold for half an hour would be having no one to call.