Categories: uncategorized
Date: 30 May 2006 17:06:37
When a company has near domination of a service it appears that they feel their customer service is of secondary concern, or perhaps that is my cynical side coming out.
On Friday we travel down to the Wychwood festival to commence this years festie season. Today being Tuesday I felt it was reasonable to be concerned that the tickets still haven't appeared. Firstly I follow the website links to register my query, then am sent back an e-mail informing me that they will aim to get back to me in 24 hours but they may be delayed in getting back to me due to a shortage of customer service staff.
So I go looking for a phone number, which I eventually find, and I dial. It is engaged, so I dial again and again. Eventually I get through to an automated system which after sending me through a range of options informs me there is a problem and I need to speak to customer services, but there is nobody available and so I will have to try again later.
At this point I am getting just a little annoyed, but am determined that I will find out what has happened to the tickets so I start the game of getting through again, which could have given me RSI of the finger for the amount of times I redialled. Anyway eventually I get through and go through the same routine, but by now I have wised up and so don't ring off, but go back to the original options and go for the "other queries" choice; this asks me to describe my query which I do, but it cuts in part way through and after the machine finds no human available trys to get me to go away again, but again I go back to the original options and repeat the process.
I figure the machine must have some way of detecting when it is not going to win because I got put on hold this time, with real music and got to speak to somebody who finds my details and tells me the tickets haven't been sent back (arggh). However, as this is now a person not a machine they are able to put me on hold to find out what the problem is and then eventually come back and tell me they have now been sent. This whole process took longer than an episode of Neighbours!!!