Comedic highlight of my afternoon:

At work, we’re having a problem with our new voicemail system. When people call to leave a message, they are asked to enter their phone number using the keypad, and then they are asked to leave a voice message. When we go to retrieve messages, we get the voice messages, but not the associated phone numbers (which people usually don’t leave in the voice message, since they figure they covered that when they entered it in).

I’m thinking there might be an online voicemail guide, so I look for the phone company website. They put it under a weird name, so it was hard to find. Finding a part of the site associated with voicemail was absurdly hard, and when I went to click the link, it was broken.

Fine.

So, I called the customer service line, where I was asked to select a “Center of Excellence.” This is when I knew it was gonna get ugly. So, I select my Center of Excellence (option #5, as it turns out). I get this girl who speaks moderately fluent English, and she asks for my phone number.

Me: two oh six, six thousand
Her: six five?
Me: six thousand.
Her: can you repeat the last four digits?
Me: six zero zero zero
Her: six hundred?
Me: Sure.

She finds me in the system with more minor hilarity (including my giving her the company name without saying "International" at the end, which really threw her off), and asks what the problem is. I explain it, just like I did above. She clearly doesn’t get it. I explain it again. No go. She has no idea how this voicemail system that her company sells actually works. I explained it about four different ways, and finally she puts me on hold to do “research.” After several minutes, she gets back on the line, and says, "ok, so you've lost your password?". I told her no, we’ve been getting the voice parts of the messages just fine. We just need to be able to get the phone numbers.

Long pause.

“Ok, ma’am, I’m going to walk you through the procedure.”

Great!

So, she gives me this step-by-step procedure, and I hang up, and I follow it.

What she gave me were, as it turns out, steps to change the outgoing message recording.

So, I call back, and choose a different Center of Excellence. Unfortunately, the various Centers of Excellence seem to share staff, ‘cause I got the same person. I asked to speak to her supervisor. The supervisor was, if you can imagine, on the phone. Probably trying to access her voicemail. Anyway, we essentially repeated the previous spiel, and then she offered to submit a repair ticket. Clearly, nothing is broken, aside from their training procedures, but she didn’t have anything else to offer me, so I accepted.



I love being an office monkey.



Please insert your personal customer service horror stories/comedy routines here.

HereToRockYourWorld said:

Outsourced?

Comedic highlight of my afternoon:

At work, we’re having a problem with our new voicemail system. When people call to leave a message, they are asked to enter their phone number using the keypad, and then they are asked to leave a voice message. When we go to retrieve messages, we get the voice messages, but not the associated phone numbers (which people usually don’t leave in the voice message, since they figure they covered that when they entered it in).

I’m thinking there might be an online voicemail guide, so I look for the phone company website. They put it under a weird name, so it was hard to find. Finding a part of the site associated with voicemail was absurdly hard, and when I went to click the link, it was broken.

Fine.

So, I called the customer service line, where I was asked to select a “Center of Excellence.” This is when I knew it was gonna get ugly. So, I select my Center of Excellence (option #5, as it turns out). I get this girl who speaks moderately fluent English, and she asks for my phone number.

Me: two oh six, six thousand
Her: six five?
Me: six thousand.
Her: can you repeat the last four digits?
Me: six zero zero zero
Her: six hundred?
Me: Sure.

She finds me in the system with more minor hilarity (including my giving her the company name without saying "International" at the end, which really threw her off), and asks what the problem is. I explain it, just like I did above. She clearly doesn’t get it. I explain it again. No go. She has no idea how this voicemail system that her company sells actually works. I explained it about four different ways, and finally she puts me on hold to do “research.” After several minutes, she gets back on the line, and says, "ok, so you've lost your password?". I told her no, we’ve been getting the voice parts of the messages just fine. We just need to be able to get the phone numbers.

Long pause.

“Ok, ma’am, I’m going to walk you through the procedure.”

Great!

So, she gives me this step-by-step procedure, and I hang up, and I follow it.

What she gave me were, as it turns out, steps to change the outgoing message recording.

So, I call back, and choose a different Center of Excellence. Unfortunately, the various Centers of Excellence seem to share staff, ‘cause I got the same person. I asked to speak to her supervisor. The supervisor was, if you can imagine, on the phone. Probably trying to access her voicemail. Anyway, we essentially repeated the previous spiel, and then she offered to submit a repair ticket. Clearly, nothing is broken, aside from their training procedures, but she didn’t have anything else to offer me, so I accepted.



I love being an office monkey.



Please insert your personal customer service horror stories/comedy routines here.

The saga continues. . .

We really needed to get this dealt with, so I called back, and asked for a supervisor. I got Tata. Tata spoke better English than the random call-center people, and seemed to have some basic level of intelligence, though still very little knowledge of how the company's services work. Unlike the rest of them, she seemed motivated to actually solve my problem.

So, I tried to explain it to her. Apparently, it's an extremely complex and confusing problem. But she told me she wanted to look into it, and she would call me right back. I told her if I didn't hear from her within an hour I would be calling her (I asked if she had a direct line. She said no. Liar.). So, she calls back within a reasonable amount of time, and informs me that the "feature" I'm inquiring about (ie. the thing where people have to enter their numbers on the keypad prior to leaving a message) doesn't exist.



I didn't WANT to laugh at her. But I did.

See, she didn't tell me this like, "oh, ha ha, how funny, they're telling me this doesn't exist, when clearly it does, how amusing." No, she tells me this like it's a SOLUTION. Like, "good news, tumors don't exist, so that thing growing on your ass is no trouble at all!" Except, they DO, and this "feature" DOES, and. . .

So, I tell her that I will hang up, and she can call me, and I'll let it go to voicemail, and she can hear it for herself. I also tell her that we have changed our outgoing message to instruct people to press #2 instead of #1, to try to get people NOT to dial in their numbers. But we know that some people who have been calling and dialing #1 for a long time will keep doing it, so it's still a problem. To hear what I'm talking about, she'll have to ignore our oral instructions and press #1. Okay.

So, as I'm sure you guessed, she calls me back, and says, "it worked fine, I was able to leave a message. . .?" And I ask her, "did you press #1?" And she says, "no, the message said to press #2."



I tell her, look. Something changed with our voicemail the other day. We had to start dialing a different number to get into it, so somebody on your end did SOMEthing with it. If you could find the person who made that change, maybe they would know what's going on. Find that person.

So, she starts looking through previous tickets, and indeed, there was somebody doing something with our voicemail a few days ago. I ask her what. She tells me that she doesn't understand the technical jargon. I ask her to read it to me anyway, so she does, and I hear something about paging.

Ok.

I tell her, look, your people are calling it "paging". Go ask around and see if the lights go on if you tell people that I need to retrieve my pages, rather than the numbers on my voicemail. She asks me, "so, you guys have pagers?"



No. We don't have pagers. Your company calls this "feature" that you don't offer "paging", which makes some sense. And there must be some way to receive the pages, or to turn off the option. And I need to know what it is. Go figure it out and get back to me.

She calls me back in a few minutes, and tells me, "I think I know what the problem is."

Fantastic!

She tells me, "you have multiple voicemail boxes. The one you were using before is different than the one you're using now. You're checking the messages in one box and missing the messages in the others. That's why you're not getting them."



No, that's not the problem. I could explain why that's not the problem (which I did, to her), but if it's not obvious why that's not the problem, just trust me, it's not the problem.

At this point, my supervisor, who has been kinda listening to this from her office, comes out, and half laughing, half pissed, tells me to hang up.

So, I did.

Our company may be featured in Time magazine this week, resulting in a drastic increase in call volumes. And we, as of right now, are not going to be able to call many of these people back.

Whaaatteevverr.
[Edited 5/6/06 19:35pm]

oh god where is dynamicsavior?