Customer Disservice

So as a small business owner, healthcare provider, caregiver, and customer, I’ve noticed some changes over the last 46-years during my career as a general dentist and family member. The technological advances have been breath taking. But, increasingly, the quality of human interaction and service most of the time are about as much fun as square dancing with a rattlesnake.

And I realize the pandemic affected us all in different ways and I know we all have blind spots simply because we’re human…but double dang it! Don’t know about you, but the isolation and multitude of various added barriers took away some of the stuff I love most, like tailgating with people I see as friends and family. Two thumbs up for science and vaccines! And we continue to shuffle toward what we remember as life before wearing a mask in a bank, slap-happy Will Smith, and Covid-19. But many still work from home, meet on Zoom, and wear facial covering while driving their Teslas solo. And I’m not even feeling the love about sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with drunken strangers spitting F-bombs during Trojan games at the Coliseum.

But the pandemic alone didn’t vaporize empathy and service, partial ownership goes to climate change, the Dodgers winning a World Series, and politicians. In November 2016, millions of Americans voted in a leader days after he clowned a reporter with a disability. But in 2004, Howard Dean’s political career ended with an innocent not-so-barbaric post-primary day yawp? One of my favorite quotes is Maya Angelou’s “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.” I guess somewhere along the line, we began paying less attention.

So, I hope you’ll bear with me while I share some unsolicited observations and personal experiences that, to paraphrase Humphrey Bogart, “…might not amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world” and are mostly, all about me.

Don’t know about you, but sometimes I wake up at 3AM wondering why anyone ever responds to a pop-up ad. It’s like you’re having a conversation with your best friend forever or savoring a Michael Connelly novel, and someone butts in with “Buy this!” I’m even more bothered that tactless rude pop-up sales crap must be working because, as far as I can tell, it’s not disappearing. Why can’t we just send the pop-ups and motorists who don’t use turn signals to Anacapa island and call it a day?

My telephone call for a human Customer Service voice has become the equivalent of the renewed quest for the Holy Grail, fountain of youth (I’d buy that pop-up!) or at least a Clippers NBA championship. I’ve found the reality of automated customer service to be an emphasis on Artificial with the total absence of Intelligence…and even with serious traces of hearing loss (Yeah, THAT’S my freakin zip code!).

And then, after traveling down the lengthy automated food chain of numerical selections by getting you to use your index digit engaging another digit with just the right finger pressure, and finally encountering a real person (I think), the reward is no solution concluding with a dial tone, a transfer to an expert with no solution, or an invitation to accept a return call that never arrives. Ugh.

A potential therapeutic fun part is volunteering a service rating measured on a scale of 1-10. The good news for Southern California Edison or Verizon or Amex is the caller’s total exhaustion, ennui, and frustration can steal away even the will to talk trash with numbers. The new goal is somehow just breaking out of digital purgatory.

During the last several months, after selling my dental practice, it seems like my new full-time job is engaging companies who’ve presented me with no contact for two years and a $15K electric bill or made transferring a telephone number seem like the most complicated achievement next to a heart transplant or memorizing all three Japanese alphabets.

I also had AMEX ding me for $1500 answering a patient (who now has perfect teeth) complaint; they cancelled the penalty when they eventually located my response (sent the same day I received the complaint.)

And one more thing, coming straight outta nowhere and after totally ignoring me for 2-years, Equinox Fitness sent their Pasadena 20-year founding member a bill for $400, for nuthin. Given the choice to pay or wonder what kind of criminal info they had on me, I resigned. I also went straight to the source or messenger and went middle digital to my digital phone. Hate to admit it, but the irony made me feel good.

I can totally feel my heart rate going up just writing about this stuff! But there’s no cold sweat and I can only see the fingers I’m looking at.

You know, maybe my friends are right. Maybe it is time to get a dog…and make him a Trojan fan, get him a Cardinal & Gold hoodie, and give him a “10” for listening…without pop-ups. Yeah, I think that’s the ticket!

Nope, I choose empathy and making a difference.