Customer Service - Now There’s An Idea!

I finally got my book up for sale on my website this week. It has been a long and arduous path that would probably have had Scott of the Antarctic thinking his wander to the South Pole was a piece of cake. Not literally speaking of course, although maybe during his final days when delirium was kicking in he did actually think it was a piece of cake, the poor chap. Anyway, I may be slightly exaggerating on the book front but only a little bit because it has been quite tough.

 

The final leg of the journey has been dealing with USPS in trying to pull a live feed in for calculating shipping rates. After I signed up I got an e-mail welcoming me to the service. It didn’t say ‘Congratulations on choosing USPS for your shipping” which was a bit disappointing because I have got used to being congratulated from buying everything from a car to a snickers bar since I came to live in the land of the free, but never mind I will get through the crushing disappointment. It did though give me a number and an e-mail address if I had any problems.

 

Well I or rather my web guy did have some problems, so I called the phone number. Amazingly I got to speak to a human being before the end of the day and I explained my problem. Then after that I told him what was wrong with the feed as well. “You need to e-mail the API team” “I have this number to call” I replied. I’m not going backwards and forwards verbatim here but suffice to say we had a 5 minute conversation where he insisted that number wasn’t for types like me with funny accents, or something like that and I questioned the logic of sending me the number if I wasn’t supposed to call it. I never found out why I wasn’t allowed to call and I guess I never will now.

 

So I did as I was told and e-mailed the support team and waited. And then waited some more and then for good measure a bit more. About 30 hours after sending the e-mail I got a reply that may as well have said “Up yours Jack” for all the use it was. It actually told me to contact my shopping cart provider. That was it, no “Congratulations on getting screwed by USPS” just a single paragraph saying something like ‘it’s nothing to do with us’.

 

To cut along story short, they were right. It was a problem with my shopping cart provider but couldn’t the guy that I spoke to first have told me that or at the very least if he didn’t know, put me on to somebody that did?

 

It seems to me that customer support is a dying trend. More big companies make their customers jump through hoops if they want any type of help that involves human interaction. Try finding a phone number to call Amazon and it will be more than a click or two away. Compare how long it takes any company to answer their sales phone as opposed to their customer support desk. Try and find a direct phone number for your local post office. I could go on and on but I think you are with me. It is all down to the relentless drive for profits and the belief that the more you cut costs the more money you make. It doesn’t work like that, at least not in the long term. Then again, so many of the publicly owned large corporations are short-sighted and driven by the desire of stockholders to make money quickly that it’s difficult to break the cycle. I guess that is another topic for another post on another day.

 

Addendum: I changed gyms this last week and one of the questions I was asked was my occupation, I replied that I was a life coach and author. I had to chuckle at that one but if you don’t believe it you aint gonna achieve it, right?

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