I don’t know what’s in the head of those people who replaced their customer reps with machines, it’s just soooo stupid, I say!
I’ll tell you what; I called my credit institution to inquire about a particular payment method. You see, I have two huge purchases and I want to pay-off the one that expires first. Right, so I called them and a machine answered me. It asked me what I wanted to do, I kept saying ‘payment option’ and it kept taking me to credit card payment; and when I said ‘option’ it kept taking me to payment schedule option. And once I’m in there, there’s no more choices, you either pay or listen to your payment schedule. There’s no option to go back to the previous menu, you will have to hang up, call them again, enter your account number again and go through the same process… bloody hell!
I called them several times and I still can’t find ways to go to the option that I wanted. Argh! And so out of frustration I said ‘I just want General Info!’ and viola! It took me to the general info option, but still there’s no payment method option, but hey! there’s an option to speak to the customer representative. At long last a human customer representative!
And so yeah I was talking to the customer representative, finally! I can't help but vent out my frustration on their voice recognition machine; that it took me almost an hour just to get through him. It probably took me a good 20mins venting out my frustration… hayyyyy. Anyway, after that I went to talk about what I really wanted. So what do I really want?
What I want is a facility to allocate my payment to a particular purchase. I’ve got two huge purchases, one is interest free and the other is not. One of them will expire soon. I told the rep that I wanted to pay Purchase A with X amount as it’ll expire soon. And then the sales rep explained to me how the payment allocation works and blah blah blah. Of course I said I want to override their automatic allocation, again the rep just repeated what he said and kept telling me that I can’t do it as the machine does it AUTOMATICALLY, but he’s happy to do it for me. That means every time I make a payment I will have to ring them, spend a good 20 mins to their machine before I speak to the rep, and then explain to the rep what I wanted, only then can re-allocate the payment for me…. geezzz… what a whole lot of trouble! And mind you, i have to do this every time i pay!!!! Argh!
Ok, enough of the credit institution’s lack of adequate business procedures, let’s talk about the machine that kills my time! Before this voice recognition machine they had the same auto answering machine, but it gives you a list of options to choose from. At least the previous one is intuitive. With the current voice recognition support, you can easily get lost, and the constant confirmation is really annoying! How can you call this customer service when it’s not actually doing the service that I want, let alone point me to the right direction? Argh!
I don’t know what these companies are thinking. If they’re going to have such a system, at least give us (customers) the option to talk to real people, and not some machines that don't understand our frustrations. I think if they don’t do something about this, they’ll definitely loose customers. I, alone, am thinking as soon I’m finished paying off the two purchases I would close my account and find a much better institution with human support, and not some machine that eats up my time… and patience!
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