If you call some of the big corporations with any questions you may have regarding the products you have from that specific company, you will no doubt be prepared to be placed on hold while the tech support is, as they say it, “looking into the situation.” Whether or not this “looking” actually refers to finding a solution or simply trying to understand what your problem is, the wait is a good waste of time.

The new trend to solve this issue or to east it on the customers [or to make it feel like it has been eased, if you are the company], is to appear very courteous to the customer, and to keep asking them simple questions repeatedly. You can ask their name, their full name, and ask them to spell it for you. Then you can ask them their phone number, make them repeat it and then repeat it yourself also. If that does not buy you time, the best thing to do is to go through all the things that you, the technical support representative, think may be wrong with the “incident” and not listen to the customer at all.

Your calls to SBC, for example, will be answered in a very different manner than your calls with Edison. While Edison staff are available 24 hours a day, and they talk to you directly as if you were in front of them and any question you have, they answer and help you solve it in less than 5 minutes, SBC will first of all make you give all your information such as name, phone number, order number and the question you have at least 2 times [one time you say it, and then the customer rep. makes you repeat it], and then they themselves repeat it to confirm that it is the case. That alone takes up 3 or so minutes. After that, if you simply tell the representative on the other line that you know what the problem is and you wish to find out a certain thing [for example, that there was an outage in the routers or something related in Souther California earlier in the day, and what is the status on that issue], the representative will not understand, at least the ones I personally faced [over 7], that all you want is an update.

The canned responses start right there; “we apologize for this inconvenience and I will personally do everything in my power to help solve this problem and make this a wonderful day for you. Now, can I know your email address so that we can send you a little survey for you to answer letting us know how well your issue was handled by us today.”

A survey to answer before your question has been answered, and that by one of the top companies on Fortune 500? That sounds very considerate of them, unless you are a lonely person who had no friends, no job, and no life and want to waste your time and are happy interacting with at least one human being, even if that human being is giving you the run around.

[Part 2 of this will be coming soon]