THE CRANKY OLD BAG BLOG

I think I need to change the name of my blog to "CRANKY OLD BAG."  I need to dig deeper and deeper for the bright side these days.

I have been thinking about all the failures in customer service I have been confronted with just in the past months; both at work and at home.  I wonder what it is all about.

Customer service just gets worse and worse - how is it companies stay in business?  Have we become so accepting of bad service that they know they don't really have to make an effort?  After all, the erosion of service has escalated over time but do we ever write a letter, change companies or otherwise make our displeasure known to the decision makers?

Personally, I have. I also found that one cable company is as bad as the other.  Banks equally deceitful and manipulative with their fees and policies.  Most business decisions for retailers and services are made so high up that it's impossible to get a message through to the decision makers about problems.  The people you are face to face with may acknowledge the issue but are powerless.

The telephone/Internet service we use at work is very difficult to get through to customer service - very long waits on hold (no exaggeration, I have listened to their music for 5-15 minutes before a person came on the line) or waited 2-3 days for a response to e-mails. On the phone, the employees are very helpful, very thoughtful.  They really work hard to resolve the issue.  Then I am inundated for days with e-mails asking me to rate the experience, rate the person who helped me, rate the company, etc. Yet even though I have repeatedly expressed what I said here with regard to the waits, etc. - nothing has been improved.  So what is the point of the surveys? To make me think they actually care? Is that their customer service model?

On the other hand, 2 days and over 4 phone hours into trying to resolve the USBank/Quicken problem (I got up at 5:30am to try this morning); no one has taken responsibility for it, figured out how to resolve it, or offered any inkling that they care what I think of their service.  USBank made it worse because the "banker" would not listen to me and ended up reconfiguring everything in my system for USBank bill pay when I use Quicken bill pay when I asked to talk to someone else,  I was "disconnected."

Is that better?  Incompetent service and we don't care to know what you think. We are not going to ask and there is no contact information for you to tell!

 Neither approach seems to care about the satisfaction of the customer and I am scared to think how much worse it is going to get. When a few corporations own everything and there is no alternative, the whole concept of customer service will become obsolete.  It will be take it or leave it. Feels like we are almost there.

GETTING OLDISH IS NOT FOR SISSIES

Not only did I take down and box up all my own holiday decorations, I spent hours at the hotel last night doing the same.  The nice part about doing it at the hotel, aside from being paid for it, was that I had a nice young man who did the heavy lifting and carted all the boxes away to store them for next year.  That part I have not done at home because I have no nice person who will help me without making a stink or requiring a bribe.

Today my left foot, which is riddled with arthritis, is swollen, very painful and making me unhappy.  My first thought was to go to the gym and work out and then take a jacuzzi.  My second thought was skip the workout and go straight for the soothing warm waters.  Instead I am blogging and complaining.  Happy?  Me neither.

My sister claims that the weather makes her ache all over.  Inwardly I have questioned this while offering soothing, supportive words.  Now I am beginning to think I am afflicted with the same issue.  The weather has been cold and rainy for weeks and I have been hobbling around that long.  The sad thing is that she is just 51 and I am her older sister.  I have arthritis in my left foot and both my knees and I think, though undiagnosed, a bit in my hands.  She has it in many more spots and more painfully,  in her back.

The internets say to use anti-inflammatories, heat or ice and lose weight in addition to piles of supplements which may or may not work - for me the glucosamine didn't work.  A physical therapist I talked to about it said that it works for some people and not for others.  I suspect that is the same story for many supplements.  The day t day handling of knee pain is in opposition in many ways to handing foot pain - so that doesn't help, either!

So now that I have started the new year off by complaining and not on the brightside, I will pick myself up and get to the gym!  If I were an emoticon person I would make a frownie face with a wink...

CUSTOMER COMPLAINTS

Having worked in customer service, I have a pretty good idea of how to make an effective customer complant. Lately I have been in a couple of situations where it is obvious that the main issue is the lack of available employees at large companies. That is an issue that isn't easily resolved by a well stated and directed complaint.

I have been looking for a new patio umbrella. My issue is that I need a smaller one than the 9 foot ones usually sold. I have been online and on the phone for days and finally thought I had found a solution in my price range at Ikea. It is a 40 minute drive, so i double checked that they had them in stock before I left. Ikea is a huge store. I wandered through the entire store looking for an employee who might tell me where the umbrellas might be (they don't have a designated outdoor/patio department). I never saw a single employee. HUGE STORE. I was there for an hour.

Fianlly in the warehouse section I found 3 employees all huddled around a computer station doing precisely nothing but standing there. I inquired about the umbrellas, they said they were sold out. I told them I checked that morning and was told they were in stock. They said the computer says they have them but they, in fact, don't have any.

So I asked about the fact that there were not any employees in the other departments of the store - had I just missed them? Nope. They were pretty much it except for the ones at the cash registers and the restaurants.

So what can we, as consumers, do when we feel that the companies we frequent are shortchanging us by not having enough employees available to serve us? Not to mention that the tools that are meant to save us from useless treks for unavailable merchandise are mismanaged?

Go to the Corporate website and write a complaint. Give specifics and be as businesslike as possible. Businesses tend to ignore the ranters. I know we did. Explain how the incident or business practice impacts you and why you plan to take your business elsewhere, assuming you do!

Go online and use Yelp and other social networking sites. I got a refund from a company that had refused to issue me a refund when I made a complaint on a site called Complaints.com.

So that is what I did and now I will just let it go - deep breath - and I have paid twice as much for an umbrella from another source and I will pick it up on Monday.