At Your Service

My mother – the late, great Sylvia Gordon – often said, “I spend half my life waiting for service people.”

Exaggeration?  Maybe not.

You know the drill:  You contact the “Customer Care” folks about your broken, non-working whatever, and after pressing an inordinate number of buttons and wading through countless menus, you eventually get someone on the phone who tells you it is their pleasure to serve you.  Hmmm.  So you make an appointment for repair, and you get “the window.”  Let’s say your window is 1-4 PM.  Here’s how this works.  If you are NOT there precisely at 1 – or even earlier – the repair guy (oops, technician) will show up then.  If you change your plans and race home to be there before or at 1, he will show up at 4.  If you are lucky.

This just happened to me recently, when a large box and two smaller boxes arrived at my door unexpectedly.  Apparently someone followed up with GE about the damaged oven door on my brand new stove.  The manager in my development must have precipitated the shipment, because we discussed this issue at our last walk-through -- maybe 3 months ago. 

Anyway, I called the Customer Care to let them know I had these big boxes and they said someone would be there two days later to install it.  If I hadn’t called them, would they have called me to let me know to stay in for “the window?”  It would be helpful for me to be home to let the guy in, don’t you think?  We worked out a day and time and I returned home promptly at 12:45.  Mike the repair guy arrived at 4.  He opened the box with the oven door (they had sent a new handle and another part that I didn’t need) and noticed it was damaged.  He then proceeded to enter information on his little computer.  I could write my life story in fewer keystrokes.  He ordered the part, said it would be shipped via FedEx and he would be back next week, same time, same deal, to replace the door -- unless it doesn’t arrive, in which case I have to call and cancel the appointment and wait (another 3 months, I suppose) until it shows up.  Then he suggested I open the large box and inspect the door to make sure this one is NOT damaged.  Right, I have so much repair experience that I can take a cursory look and determine the integrity of the part. 

Given this situation, you can understand why we are forced into the “self-service” concept.  You can wander around the supermarket now with a scanner so you check out your shopping order while you shop.  Or you can go to the “self-service” line – because there are few open registers where actual people work anymore – and scan in your own stuff.  God forbid you want to use your own bags.  The machine goes nuts and asks you with each item if you are bagging it because you aren’t using store bags.  Isn’t that supposed to be an environmentally good thing?  I always – always – have to flag down a store employee because the item doesn’t scan or the bag thing is an issue.  It’s always something. 

When the line at the deli is too long, you can buy the pre-sliced meats and cheeses or order at a kiosk and continue shopping.  It sounds good in theory, but I miss the interaction and the occasional sample piece of cheese the deli folks offer.  What’s next?  Will I have to go behind the counter and slice my own meat?

I had to take my car into the dealership for routine maintenance and I thought I would save myself some time and trouble by scheduling the appointment on-line.  That worked fine, except that the process kicked off a series of thank you messages, confirmations and reminders – in e-mail, text and phone – that took more time to process than actually calling for the appointment.  After the car was serviced, I got an e-mail and a text message to thank me, and the promise of a survey to come that I should fill out to let them know how great their customer service was. 

My dental appointments are made 6 months in advance, and I take the little appointment card, but the procedure is that I get a reminder via e-mail.  The problem with that is that the message arrives about a month before the appointment.  What’s the point?  It is so far in advance I could theoretically forget it anyway.  But no fear, because Laura in the office will call the day or two before to remind me.

Even restaurants now call to confirm your reservation.  I understand that they need to be sure their reservations are being kept, but I think I get more calls from these interactions than I do from my family and friends.  That’s because they are all so busy getting calls about appointments they have made that they don’t have time to call me!

We all have stories about contacting the bank, the insurance company (those are fun), Comcast and plenty of other companies with whom we do business to report a service outage, ask a question or try to get some kind of help.  Successful interactions are rarely done on the first call.  Assuming you can explain the problem and the agent can direct you – after you have hit 10 more buttons and been cut off three times, as I was recently with Comcast – you will get the inevitable question, “Is there anything else I can do for you today?”  Actually, you barely helped me with the first thing, so let’s not keep up this new relationship any longer than we have to.

The new trend when you call is to let you know that the wait time is X number of minutes and they will call you back if you don’t want to hold.  I called the Social Security office once and was told they would call me back at 4:06.  Not at 4, or ten after 4, but at 4:06.  The joke was on them.  They didn’t call until 4:08.

Or you can have a “live chat” with the cartoony-looking representative on your computer screen who is happy to help you.  That works, but you have to sit patiently while the rep types, and you read the message that tells you he or she is typing.  Again, I could tell my life story in fewer keystrokes. 
Those of you who live outside of NJ are used to one self-service thing that we here in the Garden State don’t have to tolerate – we don’t have to pump our own gas, which means I don’t have to get out of the car to fill up.  It would be nice if the gas station guy(s) ever bothered to look up or offer a thank-you, but that doesn’t happen anymore. 

I’m so against self-service that I don’t even want to cook my own dinner anymore.  (Ok, you could just say I’m lazy, and I won’t argue with you on that point.)  That’s why I am in love with Panera.  I can order a yummy salad or satisfying sandwich on my phone app, customize it the way I like, and they have it ready and charged to my account by the time I can drive the 2 miles from my house to pick it up.  I don’t even have to speak with a human being.  The bag with my name is waiting for me to pick it up.  Now, that’s what I call customer service!

Let’s get back to my GE experience.  My oven didn’t work when I first moved into my new house last September.  Brand new, and it would not turn on (a good excuse not to cook).  The tech came and said I needed a new control panel and it would be shipped, but when it didn’t arrive, I called my new best friends at Customer Care and was informed that it was on backorder.  And you were going to tell me that when, I asked.  Several weeks later, the part was shipped to me, and I called again to schedule the tech guy.  When he arrived, he also had the part.  I asked him if he could take the extra one back, but he told me it was expensive so I should keep it in case I need it replaced again.

The message was clear to me:  We don’t care if the company makes money, and your oven will probably go on the fritz again, so you might as well keep the spare part for when that happens.  Because it will.

The oven also had a defective light inside the stove, so I called GE about that and was asked – in all seriousness – whether I had an appliance bulb.  I explained that I had a brand new stove in a brand new house, so buying appliance bulbs to replace defective ones wasn’t part of my plan.  The Customer Care woman ordered me a new one and when it came in, I called to schedule the installation.  Instead, she told me how to do it myself, thereby saving the service call and not forcing me to stay in that 1-4 window yet again.

Back to the issue at hand – the defective oven door(s).  Someone else on my street called GE to schedule a repair of her appliance and then called me to say that the Customer Care folks seemed confused by a request for another appliance repair on the same street (two different addresses, names and phone numbers).  She wanted to give me a heads-up in case they cancelled my appointment.  I called the next day and, sure enough, GE had cancelled MY appointment when making HERS.  The part arrived, but I had to wait a few more days for the tech guy to do the installation.  The new door was also damaged, so now we are ordering it for the third time, with the new tech saying he will order it to be packed in a way that it will be protected.  Wouldn’t you think that would be the case anyway?  And I get to kill another day waiting for the arrival of the part and the repair guy.  Maybe I can just go ahead and install that, too, or maybe I can get a part-time job repairing GE appliances. 

Remember the old Maytag repairman?  He was a lonely, forlorn guy whose services were never needed because Maytag washing machines always worked – or so the ads would have you believe.  Now things are expected to fail and no one is supposed to mind. 

My last gas dryer – also a GE – needed a new control panel (you’re sensing an out-of-control trend here, aren’t you?).  This part commonly breaks because you turn the knob.  But how else can you turn the dryer on if you don’t turn the knob?  The repair guy explained that everything is made of plastic instead of metal (cue “the olden days”) and the parts don’t stand up.  So expect to repair or replace a part or an entire appliance every few years. 

And only a dozen calls, texts and e-mails later, things are working again.  I think the system is broken.  Who do we call to repair that?