This Rant Is Service Related

Written by Steve Vaughan

Wednesday, 06 August 2008

At first I thought it was just bad timing, coincidence or the stars not aligning. I am a “benefit of the doubt” type of guy but I am afraid that even though I have tried to think of every possible answer, it keeps boiling down to one thing…service in America SUCKS!

Let’s start with so called “fast” food. I went through the Hardees (some may know it as Carl's Jr.) drive through the other day and was the only one in line. It was after lunch, before dinner and no one was even inside. After about a minute waiting, the speaker flairs up asking me to hold on, another 2 minutes go buy and finally I get to order. I ordered by the number like they have spent million’s teaching us how to do and drove up to the first window.

Here I proceeded to wait another 15 MINUTES to get my money taken, order delivered, fixed, re-delivered and leave. During this time I saw two employees (obvious cashiers) playing with a toy at the counter. At no time did a manager say sorry for the wait, the employee handed me my food and never acknowledged my wait and was even annoyed when I told them the order was wrong. I don’t expect much, but there was NO attempt at any kind of customer service at all.
Don’t even get me started on the “Please Push # for this or that” and now there is NO WAY to talk to a human being without going through the whole damn process (I would pushed 0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0 until it said “Please Hold” and I got a real person). I was on the phone with a company trying to get an answer about a new DVD player we got and I know it asked 15 questions trying to get me to someone that could answer, I got mad, hit 0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0 and it HUNG UP and I had to do it all over again!

Where did good customer service go and when did companies stop caring? Let’s end it with Apple. Yea, I have a first generation iPhone. I have had it a little less than a year. Remember when they first came out, the frustration of having one while the Apple servers were down and no one could get connected?

When the iPhone 3G came out, people stood in lines for hours, even days! What did Apple learn from the first release, that it just doesn’t matter; people are going to buy it anyway. Sure enough, people bought the phone and servers went down and no one could get it connected. Worst this time though, was first generation IPhone owners who were forced to reformat to get the new software while servers went down making their phone expensive paper weights.

Maybe it is our fault. Maybe we just don’t care enough to demand customer service anymore. Damn shame, because it would be nice for someone to say “Thanks for buying our product” every once in a while.

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