Frankfurt There’s a pattern evolving for me that is starting to take shape as a campaign, even if it also feels like it’s becoming a personal obsession. I’m talking about terrible customer service handled ineptly by sundry companies, their robots, and artificial intelligence. To be clear, it’s not just their automated systems, because these call-prompt robotatons are only the manifestation of systemic commitments to profit above people and a refusal to fully train and empower the people, many layers behind, to solve the issues, if you are persistent and obnoxious enough to get to them.
I’ve ranted about Capital One and Amazon before, but my recent experience with Verizon and Asurion just about takes the cake, even as horrid as those earlier encounters had been. This is one that you almost had to have been there yourself to imagine how amazingly bad it was.
My phone was nicked in the Korogocho district of Nairobi when I wasn’t as attuned to my surroundings as usual, and stupidly leaned out in the street while we were door knocking to take a picture of a herd of goats coming down the road towards us. A moto-driver served to get around a speed bump, while I was leaning my phone out to get the shot, knowing my family would get a hoot out of it, and the passenger grabbed my phone on the sweep, and I failed to keep it in hand. This is just something that comes with my work. Over the years, I count myself lucky. A computer stolen in Bogota, a tablet and some stuff in Accra on a plane change, a bag slit with a knife in the Nairobi airport twenty years ago, and now this phone. Pretty much these are inconveniences, not tragedies.
My phone was a Kyocera manufactured in Japan and provided by Verizon. It’s hard-cased, so I love the fact that it’s almost indestructible, but otherwise likely no one’s first choice. I pay for insurance on my phone, because I would be stupid not to do so. I have a password on the phone. The contacts are on Google, so they are safe. I’ll lose the old Signal and WhatsApp messages and have to reinstall and set the passwords on other apps, but life goes on, once I get a new phone, and there’s the rub.
Returning to my computer and borrowing a colleague’s phone, I started reaching out for Verizon as soon as we got back from Korogocho to the ACORN team’s base camp in Nairobi. I also alerted my super competent home team, mi companera and mi hijo, for help on that end. First, Verizon wouldn’t recognize my pin. None of the prompts knew what to do when I would say my problem was “stolen phone.” The robot took me to their website to handle this, and the website would freeze every time it came to powering down the phone remotely or suspending service. After a half-hour of this madness, I was beaten. Not so in the home front. Somehow mi companera succeeded in breaking through to a person, who verified me via email, and then she kept hammering them until they suspended my service. My luck seemed to be changing when I got a message from her that Verizon said call Asurion, the insurance company at a certain 800 number, and they will get a phone to you PDQ.
As soon as I knew it was 8am on Saturday EST and 4pm Nairobi time, I was on the borrowed phone. When I called Asurion they simply told me to go to a website. Doing so, and hitting the Verizon button among a half-dozen companies they handle, sent me merrily to a broken link that said to call back to the same 800 number that in a daisy chain fashion would send me back to the broken, ineffective website. Wash, rinse, rewash, my hair was on fire.
I finally got New Orleans on the phone and asked, “how did you actually get a person.” The answer seemed ridiculous. She said she kept saying “stolen phone” over and over again until a person came on. She had read a website that suggested you say “Agent” until they cried “uncle” and brought a person to the line. I was incredulous. “Are you kidding?!?”
I had no choice. Get up or give up. I called the Verizon 800 number again, and every time the robot said something, like a fool, I yelled into the phone “stolen phone, agent” over and over again, and lo and behold, after somewhere between a dozen and twenty times, a voice from some offshore customer service location answered. Then I was a dog on a bone. She didn’t know what to do about Asurion. She said one option was me buying a new phone from Verizon on a promotion, to which I answered, “why did I pay for insurance then?” Finally, she agreed to see if she could contact someone at Asurion. I was on hold for almost 15 minutes, and finally had to hang up to join a call for our union’s board meeting. As I signed on, I could see Verizon was calling me. I switched to that line. She patched me into someone at Asurion. There was light at the end of the tunnel. Of course, they called a Kyocera a “rare” phone that they couldn’t provide in stock, but within another 12 minutes I had paid the $99 deductible and there was a Samsung phone being shipped to me that I would have by Monday in New Orleans.
This is not a happy ending. It’s more of a “I survived to fight another day” story. How can it be an acceptable customer service system for a giant Telecom and its inept insurer if the only way you can actually get help for something, besides paying your bill, is to yell in the phone twenty times like a crazy person. For me and mine, we could pretend that is therapeutic, but for most people, that’s just an example of how little customers mean to these companies, even for the technically able. For many, maybe most of our ACORN members, pushing them to the website alone might have been enough of a brushoff.
Why can’t the FCC insist on effective customer service? Same question for insurance and banking regulators? Looking at the bottom line, means people will always be last, but governments are supposed to put people first. It’s not happening. Meanwhile, let’s hope yelling at the robots and punching the “O” on your phone over and over again works for all of you, even if it’s not a plan.