I’m all for advances in technology, especially when it makes a job easier, or eliminates unnecessary aspects of tedium. And I understand concepts such as efficiency when it comes to contact centers – the more customers you can handle in a shorter period of time, the less expensive it is.
But I still haven’t had a good online chat experience. Here’s today’s example, with an catalog company called Personal Creations:
The time between “personal shopper is joining you now” and “you are now chatting with Sarah” was a good 3 minutes. The time between “it is probably best” and “thank you goodbye” was about 1.5 seconds.
The issues I have with this:
- She assumes I’m looking for an approximate shipping date. Maybe this is because she COMPLETELY IGNORED MY REQUEST. She probably had other steamy instant messages going on with her prison pen pals in another window and I was interrupting.
- I didn’t get to explain my issue. Maybe she was doing her nails and only uses the mouse, no keyboard.
- I didn’t get to complain about the bad service. After the “chat session has ended” I couldn’t do anything – not send another line, not give feedback, not call a supervisor, nothing. How can I rip someone a new one if they’re not there?
Thanx for nothing, Personal Creations! We’ll see if we spend our hundreds and hundreds of holiday dollars with you next time.
Oh, and on top of that, I call the number, wait for 10 minutes and when they answer the first thing they tell me is that if I placed the order within the last two hours, I have to WAIT two hours for the order to be in their system. I let them know that I can view the order fine on the web site, but she assures me that she can’t do anything for two hours. Oh, and if I want to make a change, I have to call before the end of the day, because once it’s in the warehouse, there’s no changing.
