We in the UK have many things to thank America for and
arguably the most significant of these are Freedom of Speech and now knowing
how to make a complaint about poor customer service. If there is one nation
that knows how to complain it must surely be America without whom we simply
would not have learned how to take many a supplier to court for failure to
deliver a service or for poor product that fails to do what the enterprise says
it will.
When it comes Information Technology the provision of
contact details for customers to complain is woefully lacking via official
channels and instead what we are left with is a trial by media option as a
precursor to court proceedings.
If you think about search engine providers, computer
programmes and mobile phone providers that we use daily for business, firewall
security and website hosts very few supply us with a ‘customer service’ button
to click when we have a problem. Even when you manage to find a ‘contact’
button they rarely lead you to a customer service department and more commonly
you end up with the home page appearing on your screen sending you back to your
starting point. Make no mistake here, this is not by accident, this is by
design and wholly intentional on the part of these service providers because if
it isn’t, it suggests they are as thick as shit. They are in the trade of
supplying information technology services and yet they are incapable of
supplying the information of contact details for customers to point out that
there’s a glitch. Below are just five examples of what we’re up against... the
list is inexhaustible.
Seven examples of IT
services that do not have easy access contact details to make a complaint
- AVG
- Blogger
- T-mobile
When a glitch happens in IT is invariably devastating. To
give a couple of examples from recent times banking systems fail to work,
emergency response services fail to get informed of life threatening situations
and national security systems can also be jeopardised. Fortunately in the
latter two examples people are canny enough to get round these things as their
stock in trade is dealing with emergencies, so it’s only us ordinary folk that
bear the brunt of IT screw-ups. Hands up who has experience of the frustration
of not being able to make a call, send an email or even access the internet at
a critical moment in your business or personal life?
You might think then that it is time to ditch all things
computerised and revert back to the more civilised pace of posting handwritten
correspondence, sadly though even that service relies on computers and IT
technology and there too you will find there are few contact buttons that will
lead you to a satisfactory customer service experience. At this point I am
tempted to suggest semaphore, smoke signals, carrier pigeons, Chinese whispers
and an assortment of trained pets, though I doubt we’d get far sending our
goldfish to deliver our tax information to HMRC tempting though it may be to do
so.
“How can you learn what needs fixing if
you have no complaints procedure to tell you?”
What we need is a
‘complaints’ button and a ‘suggestions’ button with full contact details of
phone, postal and email addresses. However there is a slight problem with that
in that with billions of people complaining at the same time over millions of
glitches it would crash the system entirely. This is why we end up with
frustrating situation after frustrating situation to wade through and it is
also why the most powerful IT service providers of all are somewhat over
endowed with their own self-esteem - which is a polite way of saying that they
are complacently arrogant.
It used to be that money drove the world and money stems
from business, now I think it is more accurate to say that it is IT. We do
still have the power to complain via social media but only when it too works.
Unfortunately... sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and even blogsites
like this one on Blogger also fail to provide easy access contact details when
there is a fault. It is perhaps understandable then that we have ended up with
what we have now got with update after update to fix glitches complete with new
glitches to replace the old ones to drive us all insane.
I personally intensely dislike the invasive nature of Google
and Microsoft on my own PC as I now have to work extremely hard to stop them
both altering the settings on my personal computer while allowing them to
access it enough for the darn thing to work at all. To me it is an invasion of
my privacy and right to choose. Most people do not have the knowledge to
overcome such invasions and no doubt I won’t be able to for much longer either
as I am not an IT guru.
Regrettably we live in competitive times business wise
which, when it comes to IT, means we will continue to be swamped with ever more
gadgets with ever more shiny buttons and ideas for us all to be seduced by,
very few of which we need to function by. The solution might lie in banning all
advertising for all IT products and services to reduce the number of problems
generated as the more complex/sophisticated any system is the more points of
failure it will always have.
“If it works don’t fix IT”
We, as consumers do not help by demanding that things are
fixed immediately to provide the system developers no time to do it properly as
their bosses do not provide them with the time to do so as they are paranoid
about the loss of income during that period. We also do not help by trying to
fix systems ourselves when we have next to no knowledge of how it was put
together in the first place. Ask ten IT trouble-shooters to remedy your
problems and you get ten different answers as to what the problem is let alone
how it needs to be sorted. Why then do we assume we know better? In a way we
do, as we are acutely aware of what won’t work for our desired use whereas the
geeks that come to our rescue commonly pay little or no attention to what our
actual needs are as they don’t tend to be up on social skills as it’s not their
area of expertise. Personally I prefer things to work properly and for that to
happen I would be more than happy to wait until they do (if I was notified
beforehand) in preference to the perpetual loop of frustration that we have
now.
I say this as one who helped design a bespoke program with a
system developer whereby I explained to him how people actually use their
computers and he ensured that the program was fit for them to do so their way, NOT his. The last I heard the
program is still up and running and has never had to have a fix for any glitch.
Tweaking to hone and make improvements is one thing, but that only works if you
test drive thoroughly before you roll it out. The moral of the tale being that...
if IT works DO NOT fix IT.
One can but dream that the IT sector finds solutions for
what currently fails so regularly before it inflicts even more upon us
especially with the internet of thingies well underway. I am determined to let
as little of those ideas enter my home as possible purely because I could do
without the stress of them not working too.
