>>6196988 (pb)

What a load of bullpucky! Corporations care about their customers less than ever.

Try calling one sometime; your call will be answered by a poorly-programmed computer (often with voice-response inputs which fail to process human voices accurately). Said computer announces that the customer should listen carefully to the entire recording because their menu has changed recently (which is usually a lie).

After hearing an option which the customer thinks might apply to his or her situation, said customer learned through repetition that the computer cannot understand the customer's responses. Multiple jabs at the keypad sometimes accomplishes being transferred into the hold queue. While waiting in the hold queue, the customer will hear a recording tell him/her repeatedly to go to the corporation's web site rather than waiting to speak with an actual human. All manner of argumentation is arrayed against the customer in attempts to dissuade him/her from actually bothering one of their inadequate number of human representatives. Another common ploy is to apologize for the wait, explaining that the corporation is experiencing an unusually high call volume (which is pre-programmed message and is present on every call to that corp, regardless of day or time of call).

More often than not, if the customer waits long enough to reach an actual human being, the corporation's representative is not based in the calling customer's home country and has at best a tenuous grasp of the language needed to speak with the customer. Furthermore, the representative lacks authority to resolve any issue the customer may have, and/or lacks the prerequisite knowledge to resolve the problem. Inevitably, the customer is transferred and again lands in a hold queue, after which the customer must begin from the beginning explaining who he or she is, the reason for the call, and all which transpired between the first-line representative and the customer.

By this time, the customer has wasted at least half an hour of his or her valuable time, and is frustrated. The customer has been insulted in may ways, by having been discouraged from calling at all; by being forced to take orders from a computer; by having said computer fail to understand the customer's voice responses; by having to wait in multiple hold queues; and often, by having to prove that the customer even has permission to call the corporation (are you listening, HP?).

So, if customers are eradicating silos, it isn't happening in large US-originated corporations. Perhaps it's happening somewhere, but not in the USA. A pity; not that long ago, US corporations were leading the world in quality customer service. Then the Japanese overtook American corporations, and that was the beginning of the end of "service" in the USA.