Technology marches on, however it is making it difficult to actually talk to someone if you need to contact a major company. Any standard call to a complaints or service centre instantly routes you through a voicemail led menu system that offers wave upon wave of choices which you have to sit through, knowing full well you need to hold to the bitter end until it actually puts you through to someone who can actually understand your particular issue.
Voicemail may be a great time saver for companies, but it doesn't really do a great deal for customer service when you spend ten minutes hopping from option to option, only to have to hang up and do it all again because you took the wrong path down their menu tree. Once I had to deal with a company that handled every call via voicemail: you called, left a message and a call back number and then camped next to the phone for the next few hours like some desperate lonely person waiting for a date to ring them.
Phone support should be efficient and above all, honest. I don't appreciate the little dance that's often scripted into the operator's call sheet asking about my health or what the weather is like in my number-identified area. I'm not going to marvel at the call centre banalities, I'm going to be more impressed if I get the problem sorted or connected quickly to someone who can deal with it effectively, it occurs to me that a lot of customers would be more polite off the bat if they realised this would be the norm.
It seems like that many companies use their phone service to create a barrier between their staff and their customers, instead of using the second-best method of directly communicating with them. Maybe it's a side-effect of the savings in time and efficiency that automated services bring, anything that is convenient and cheap is seen as good for the company. What a customer really appreciates however, is a bit of personal care and attention. This simply doesn't come across any more in the factory conveyer-belt style call handling these days.
