After reading Russell Shaw’s recent post about the garbagy customer service tech consumers experience, I have to pile on with a few anecdotes of my own. I’m sure you’ve all been there:

Yesterday, I had to do an address change on a bunch of my credit cards and assorted accounts for whom I have a billing address. One of them took me 35 minutes–35 minutes–to complete. The reason for the difficulty was the well-meaning but  listening-challenged Indonesian girl who took my customer service call (for my Visa and MC).  Of note, she didn’t understand the word “suite” (my new address has a suite number in it) and she kept adding a one to the end of my zip code.  No joke, I bet I recited my address, and parts of it, at least twenty times, and this was after having failed at their automated speech recognition system (it apparently doesn’t like suite numbers either).

My question is–how is profitability affected by this sort of “customer service”?

There are, of course, still exceptions to this trend–the Apple Store is a good example of a place that’s getting it right with knowledgeable people and a way of managing the demand for them (Apple Concierge).  And I recently saw a Gateway Computer television ad touting the fact that all of their phone support people are “in America and Canada”.  Well, you know what–GOOD.  Gateway, there may yet be hope for you.