Customer Service: Is it dead?

Covid-19 has no doubt impacted businesses in lasting ways. While some businesses were shut down, a lot of businesses had to reduce capacity and operational limits, and shift operations to remote overnight. As a result, it is understandable that businesses had to prioritize available customer service resources to focus on critical tasks, and de-prioritize other non-essential services.

What is not understandable is that close to two years in to the pandemic, when businesses should have had ample time to stabilize their operations, customer service still sucks. To the extent that I dread calling any contact center helplines, and now prefer emails (even when they are slower), to at least save myself the annoyance and frustration of dealing with customer service. Here are some recent examples that I had to deal with:

1. Call with an airline to change credit of miles from one airline program to another: Spent one and a half hour on hold, without talking to a human. I wasn't sure how much longer it'd take, and ultimately, I ran out of patience, and had to ultimately give up on my request
2. Call for boking a driving test: I spent fifteen minutes figuring out the magic combination of inputs required to connect with a human agent and another thirty minutes waiting for one to become available. All of this after their website refused to let me book a test because of some unknown error
3. Call with a bank to unblock my credit card: I was planning a trip to Europe, and when trying to make a payment for my hotel booking, the bank decided to block that transaction and my credit card along with it. This is not the first time it has happened, but that's a topic for another post. After spending almost an entire day planning the trip, this was the last hotel I had to book. It was 1 am, and I really wanted to get the planning over with. And then my transaction declined. I tried to use my other credit card, and same (as I said, this is a topic for another post). Out of credit cards, and to sustain my day-to-day life, I needed to get my cards unblocked. Hoping it will be easier to do so at 1 am, I decided to call the bank right away. I waited on the line for forty five minutes wondering the entire time, how many people are calling Fraud analysts at 1 am in the night!! Or rather, how many Fraud analysts are actually supporting night shift operations? After forty five minutes, I was too tired to care, and hung up, pretty sure that the answer is zero - zero Fraud analysts supporting the operations at night, and they just didn't change their IVR to reflect that!
4. Call to a Telco to learn more about a promotion they had physically mailed to my address: This was for a promotion they had mailed me. So this was not even customer service. I had to wait twenty five minutes to speak to someone, and to only learn that the promotion was exactly same as the offer I currently had from my existing provider. Talk about waste of time and effort.
5. Multiple calls with a bank to cancel my credit card: I first spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out the magic combination. Ultimately, I realized that the only way for me to connect with a human was to say that my card was lost or stolen. Though I felt pretty shitty lying every time I did this, I also realized I had no choice. After some wait, I would connect with a human who would listen to my request and immediately mention that cancellation requests are handled by another department, and ask to transfer. And EVERY TIME, I'd think, so, the other department is taking calls. Just not from customers directly. Like, WHAT THE F*CK are they even doing!?
6. Call to a visa processing center: A recent attempt to provide extra information for an application on a call led me to spend thirty minutes trying to find the magic combination required to connect with a human. After trying all the combinations and endlessly hearing about busy they were due to the ongoing situation, I still couldn't figure out the way to connect with a human, and had to spend equal amount of time finding the online application form to service my request. Granted, a visa processing center doesn't need to be the most customer centric organization in the world, but I'd have expected something a bit better

While there are just so many more examples where businesses are taking customer service for granted, two businesses have stood out for continuing to provide stellar service:

• Amazon: no surprises there. They pride themselves in being the most customer centric company on earth, and stand by that even in these circumstances. I had to connect with a seller for a refund on an item that was no longer sold on Amazon. I went to their website, asked for someone to call me on my number, within seconds I had a call, and within seconds of answering I was connected to a human discussing my problem. I was about to cry from tears of joy
• Koodo: while they don't come close to Amazon, they do a pretty good job to deserve a mention in this list. I wanted to discuss my current plan with them. I called up their customer service, which after telling me to use self-service chat function hung up on me. I was pretty annoyed here. Thankfully they sent me a message with the link to the chat facility. The chat was fairly intuitive and responsive, and within a couple of minutes, I was able to schedule a call back. The call back was only scheduled for forty minutes later, and they gave me a window of thirty minutes for a human to call me. So while they didn't offer instant support like Amazon, they didn't make me wait on hold for ninety minutes either.

What has your post-Covid customer service experience been? Let me know in the comments below!

Note: views expressed in this article are independent views of the author, and do not reflect views of any organizations or affiliates that the author works with.