I have a very typical issue to discuss on the forum. In canada the well known customer service department, or customer service centres or customer relation department in various bank, service providers, stores, telecommunication, immigration, customs, govt offices are only capable upto giving you robotised recorded messages and automated email messages. You call any service provider, company, bank or immigration you will face various options to go through and then hold the phone for long time and finally you will not get anything connected or even if you are connected you will hear fixed FAQs reply in recorded way even by human respondent. For example if you are looking for some short service complaint or update on your delivery or whatever you will hear typical response that we have noted your problem and we will get back to you. that will be followed by prefabricated email or letter response which will be close to your problem but not the exact solution of your problem. Even if you try to find exact solution mostly robotised human respondent will repeat their own words.
In call centres of CIC India you can never get through your requirement and querries instead you will keep on pressing 100 buttons by the timeyou bang the phone down and prefer to sit quite. Similarly i waited for 4 and 1/2 years to get my visa stamped. AFter coming here same thing continued with every public dealing and nothing worked as per expectation even worse than less advanced coutries like thailand.
Now I have made compromise to wait for anything without knowing exactly the result the way people wait for rain in desert .

Moreover we can call it customer harassment centres which would delay all your process and most of such centres do not know or understand your problem, but rather theywill give you fixed solutions from their mugged up answers- like they read the book and gulped it down the neck.

One incidence i want to narrate is when I wanted to fix my internet problem, i was moved to differnt phone lines in one hour and everytime i was asked if i have connected plug, if i have connected modem cable, if i am able to see the windows screen, if i am able to see modem light flashing- for four times. And at the end of day after making many calls the solution was that i need to pay so and so to get things fixed up . and the whole issue was the server down which this people coudn;t confirm..

Similarly things go with banks(wire delay querries- you will hear the fixed solution), if your phone do not work, or you apply for new IDD call service provider or you buy something online .

Any special request made which do not have in their FAQ will be treated close to the nearest question.

Now i have a question are these people human being or robots and are we suppose to face this robots who have monotous response which is not solution to the problem.

I think India has more logical reasoning and exact response though we Indians do not work since we believe in short cutting & corruption at all levels.

But it is same story here in canada for other reasons and you struck up in life however you are ready to spend , but nothing gets timely.

I need some more comments or arguments on this subject from other members.

Hi tranquiliser,

It is an interesting topic. As most of the organisations are growing bigger and complex, they have no choice but to opt for automated customer care departments, where the most frequently asked questions will be answered. However these organisations should have another option for customers who are not enquiring about the FAQs.

Any organisation providing customer care/service, always look for economical ways of doing things. The reason being that they consider these units as cost centers. They are ready to invest more in aggressive sales & marketing units because they are the ones who converts their products into money. Another important aspect of commercial entities is the competition, demand & supply ratio. When organisation faces stiff competion in the market then they will care more about customer satisfaction and come up with innovative ideas of increasing customer satisfaction.

Customer service is a big joke in Canada.-- automated and recorded service......it is a big mesh.

As pointed out by ETH the customer service agents are required to sell and meet sales targets to keep their jobs. Their training is geared towards sales and not customer service. That is the reason you would find them lacking in service aspects. Because service alone does not bring money to the company.

The big companies spend considerable amount of money in screening incoming telephone calls. If the system determines that the call has sales potential, it would receive immediate and best attention otherwise you may have to wait till an agent becomes available.

In one of the big Canadian Banks, where I worked for sometime, a customer service agent has to meet the following minimum to keep his job:

-dollar volume per hour
-units sold per hour
-number of calls per hour
-idle time between calls
-call wrap time
-call quality
-accuracy

If I give you the numbers you would be surprised how hard-pressed the 'customer service' agent is to meet these performance measures. I am sure the same is true for all the big companies. And most of the phones are manned by desis. The management knows pretty well that they have nowhere else to go and takes advantage of their situation. Most of the goras don't last long in these boiler rooms for more than a few months.

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Man's Best Friend

It is true that Automation has creeped into Customer Service. There is no face to these calls. A recent example I had was with Primus. They kept me on hold with some jazz music for a good hour and twenty minutes. I really Sympathise with the Reps who work in such Call Centers.

Same with CIBC and Royal bank.

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What goes around comes around...
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A CANADIAN INDIAN

Hi Tranquiliser

You have put all what i had experienced. It has put me off so badly that i can't say more than this "All this IVR systems sucks."

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Manjeet Singh

complete harassment.