I hate losing my cool.

I hate being the guy yelling at someone over the phone, someone who (in all likelihood) wasn’t responsible for the problem in the first place.

I don’t want to be “That Guy.”

And so I try to avoid it.

I go out of my way to be reasonable and courteous when talking on the phone with support people.

The problem is that it just doesn’t seem to work very well.

I don’t know if I’m just unlucky or what, but I seem to have to make several phone calls to get problems solved.

Most Recent Case-In-Point

I don’t know if it was due to living in a swing state (which, by the way, is not nearly as much fun as it sounds), but we have been getting as many as a dozen calls a week, sometimes several per night, where the caller ID said only “Private”.

Of course we’re on the Do Not Call list, but that doesn’t seem to matter. Politicians and fund-raising are exempt from the list, and we still routinely get calls from people offering to lower our credit card debt, etc.

I called AT&T about their Privacy Manager feature, and was pleased to learn about their All Distance plan, which would add more features to my phone service for a lower price per month.

One of the included features was Privacy Manager, which is what I had called about in the first place.

This was Monday, October 27th, around 10 a.m. EST. I was told that it “should be on by Wednesday, but maybe as late as Friday” and I was given a number to call to configure Privacy Manager.

I called the automated number late Wednesday, and it wasn’t setup. That was frustrating (more calls coming in) but I decided to be patient, after all they said as late as Friday.

I called late Friday, and it wasn’t setup.

I called AT&T and they had already left for the day.

Saturday I called AT&T again and was told that it was “Pending” and that there wasn’t anything she could do to make it happen faster.

Wednesday I tried again, still not working. I called Friday and was told that “the system doesn’t even show that it was ordered.”

Doing my best to keep calm, I expressed my disappointment that I was a) being told this now, almost 2 weeks after I first called, and b) that I had been told before that it was shown as “Pending”.

The customer service person apologized and said she could have it turned on “by tomorrow” (Saturday).

I thanked her, and hung up, wondering why I was told it would take “2-5 days” to get it turned on the first time, but then she could get it turned on within 24 hours.

Sunday, when I tried it again, it still wasn’t working.

Monday I called again, and made my way through their awful voice-prompt call-routing version of hell again, and finally got through to yet another “customer service” person.

Who asked me for an order number.

Mind you, I don’t remember ever being given an order number in the first place, nor had I been asked for an order number any of the several times I had called before, but now, after telling her that I had ordered this service two weeks earlier she asked for an order number.

I started to lose my cool.

She checked the system and told me that it did show as “Pending, and there’s nothing I can do to make it happen any faster.”

In hindsight, I assume that this must be something that they are trained to tell people who call one day after ordering something which is scheduled to take longer.

It is, the training should teach them, not something you ever say to someone who has been waiting for two weeks.

Not unless you want them to lose their cool.

Which I did.

I informed her that I had been waiting for two weeks and had no intention of waiting another damn day, and I either needed to talk to someone who could do something about it or I needed to talk to someone about closing down my entire damned account with AT&T.

She transferred me to someone else who was magically able to get Privacy Manager turned on the same day.

To Recap

I called up on October 27th to add a service that I would be paying for to my phone (this wasn’t something they were doing out of the goodness of their hearts, it wasn’t a favor I was asking them to do for me, this is a paying service in a highly-competitive market).

I was told I had to wait 2-5 days.

When I called back the 2nd time to complain about it not being turned on yet, I was told I would have to wait another day.

When I called back the 3rd time, lost my cool and yelled, I was able to get the service turned on the same day.

If the service can be turned on within 24 hours, why tell me to wait 2-5 days?

Why should something like this take 2-5 days? It’s not as if someone had to come to my house and flip a switch; it was almost certainly done on a computer somewhere.

What does this teach us?

This is only one example. It’s not the first time that something like this has happened, and it’s not only AT&T that has done this.

I would hate to do customer support, I would hate to do customer support over the phone even more.

But when you customer support is behind a pain-in-the-ass voice navigation system, followed by being on-hold, followed by being told that I need to be patient, that there’s nothing anyone can do, then I have to call back again and hear there’s no record of my order, then I call back again and get asked for a piece of information that I was never given…

Is anyone surprised when people get angry at the people doing customer support?

Does this process of “being patient” = “being told to wait and have nothing happen” versus “get angry” = “get the desired outcome on the same day” teach anything other than “If you want something done, you’ll have to get angry?”

Let me reiterate, I hate losing my cool. I tried very hard not to lose it, and I can sympathize with the people on the other end of the phone who have to deal with getting yelled at.

Regardless of what you might want to argue in the abstract, the fact of the matter is that time and time again, “the squeaky wheel gets the grease” especially for definitions of “squeaky” that include “angry”.

If I could actually get customer service without yelling, we’d both be happier.

Nobody wins.

But I’m left to wonder: if I had called back on Wednesday and gotten angry, could I have gotten it turned on sooner?

If I called back Friday and yelled, would I have gotten more success at getting it turned on Saturday?

Perhaps I didn’t need to get angry at all; perhaps the person I talked to on Monday was going to get it fixed the same day regardless.

Maybe. But it didn’t work the first three times I tried it.

Update 2008-11-14: AT&T emailed me today to tell me that the service was activated (which it was… 5 days ago) and that it would cost me an extra $1.57 per month. When it was supposed to be part of the package that we purchased. AT&T continues to innovate in the “finding ways to screw up” sphere.