Press 1 For Nothing — The New Zen of Customer Assistance

Once upon a time, I took a second job at a call center. Located in a chilly, dark warehouse in New Jersey, the call center consisted of cubicles, each with their own computer screen and phone.  Headphones, with removable ear covers for sanitary reasons hung on a rack and you grabbed a pair on your way in. From 7 -11 each evening I answered calls to several numbers that callers were responding to because of ads that they had seen somewhere.  My job was to read the script I was given, take their information (if they would give it!) and move on to the next caller. My calls were timed and could be monitored. No chitchat allowed, no off-script conversations, no wasting time. Mostly, I took contact information so that people could be sent “more information” about a certain product or service.

Our biggest “client” was a cruise line, and there was a limited amount of information we could give out. Basically, a travel agent located close to the caller was going to contact them by phone or mail to try and sell them a cruise based on information we got from them. People were calling us, so the job was relatively simple, low-key and uneventful. 

All that changed when a ship belonging to the cruise line had an onboard fire. Photos from helicopters showing the smoke and the passengers on deck were all over the news. Cell phones were rare at that time, so unlike cruise ship incidents that would happen later, most people could not speak to their loved ones to check on them. The cruise line wasn’t doing a good job with communicating with families either, because pretty soon the phones at the call center were lighting up with desperate people, frantic to get through to a live person on any number they could find. Unfortunately, the call center wasn’t even owned by the cruise line, wasn’t located in their building, and had no real connection to it. Crying people could not understand why this 800 number that was so prominently advertised could not help them, or transfer them to another department that could help them. We were so far out of the cruise line’s thoughts that they hadn’t even considered sending us information on what to do if we got calls about the emergency. 

Since that time, there have been many more cruise ship problems, and I hope that communications have improved and no clueless person in an offsite, contracted call center has to take a call from a weeping family member again. I don’t work there anymore, so I don’t know. Unfortunately, I do have my doubts – because customer service, crisis communications and general consumer responsiveness remains, in many industries, a murky, pothole-ridden road that often leads to a dead end. 

It is almost a mathematical certainty that the larger the corporation, the more distant “customer service” is from actually assisting customers. Calls are still going to offsite and offshore call centers where responsiveness ranging from nothing more than a person taking “someone will get back to you” messages, to impossible phone trees that never get you to a live person. And this doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of help lines and assistance lines for all the electronic mayhem we deal with such as cable television, computer repair, cell phone activation, etc.

While business and current events seem like they are rushing past us at the speed of light, other things have slowed to a crawl. Consumer phone messages and emails go unanswered, stacked up like the letters to Santa in the movie “Miracle on 34^th Street.”  It is happening with doctors’ offices, government services and financial institutions. Just ask anyone who has been the victim of identity theft how difficult it can be to actually interact with anyone who can actually do something for you, “now.” And yet, some of those very same institutions have no trouble find YOU if they want something from you. It reminds me of the newest commercials for online services that point out how different your “upload” and “download” speeds can be.

I wish I had an answer, a shortcut, a secret way for all of us stuck in customer service purgatory to get the help, the answers, the ATTENTION we need. Burt all we can do is sit on hold and wait. Your call is important to … only you.

Dylan Thomas - Do not go gentle into that good night

I have quoted from it often, this poem from Dylan Thomas. Written for his father, its message is deeper than its surface reading that talks about what "men" do at the end of life. It speaks to all of us, old and young, male and female, about the fragility of our existence, the importance of what we do while we are here, and the legacies we leave behind. Recently, a commercial for a wrestling video game invokes this poem. Rather than being offended by this commercialization of the poem, I am hoping it inspires people to go look it up, in the same way that the Apple commercial inspired so many to go discover Whitman.

What will my verse be, indeed.

Dylan Thomas - Do not go gentle into that good night
Walt Whitman - Oh Me! Oh Life!

Slip Sliding Away

October steamrolled right through Halloween into November, and suddenly, it is mid-November. Less than 5 months to go and my pile of "before 60" things has not shrunk. Not much anyway. I applied to be a speaker at a TEDx conference. Check. I applied for a scholarship for the AATH conference. Check. I won't hear the decisions about those items for a while, but the checklist is to do things I can control. Applying was under my control. After that, whatever happens is up to the universe. Or at least the Selection Committees.

Life is winding up in the bullpen to come out and pitch me some curve balls soon. I know they are coming, I cannot control their arrival or their repercussions. All I can do is put on my batting helmet and step up to the plate.

And yes, a good baseball metaphor helps get me through some of the roughest things life can throw at me. Batter Up!

Tracker Panic, or, The Case of the Missing Memory

 This morning I left my electronic fitness tracker on my wrist, in the nighttime writstband, while I cleaned the bathroom, and put away laundry. 

 I was suddenly distracted by a medical emergency with Dewey, my cockatiel, who was covered with blood. I whisked her to the sink to clean her up, and found no active bleeding, just a lot of feathers coming in. I guess she pulled on one or got it caught somehow. I bathed her, cuddled her in a towel, then returned her to her cage under a warm light bulb to help her dry and feel better. I gave a sigh of relief as she began preening herself, chirping, and eating. Whew, that was scary.

It was then I realized that I was no longer wearing my electronic fitness tracker. I assumed I had taken it off before bathing my bird, but it wasn't near the sink. Not near the towels, not near Dewey's cage. Then I thought, maybe I took it off while cleaning the bathroom. It wasn't in there either. I started to feel annoyed and upset with myself. Lately I've been forgetting where I put down my cell phone, and have had to go back to my bathroom in the morning to make sure the curling iron was turned off.

Short term memory loss, I thought. Now it begins. My concern turned into panic. No, no, this can't be happening. I have way too much left to do in my life. My grandchildren are only babies. It took me 50 years to find the LOML. I left the house to run an errand and drive through the nearby park, taking in the brilliant fall colors just to calm myself down.

When I got home, the LOML braved both the kitchen and bathroom garbage cans. No tracker. The darn thing was still synching to my phone, so we knew it was in the house. But where in the world did I put it? The freezer? Isn't that a typical hiding place for those with memory problems to put things? Not there. Not in the laundry, or the dog's dish or my shoes. Not pushed under the couch or the dresser by the vacuum today.

Finally, I looked up some helpful hints for finding a lost electronic fitness tracker. Yes, the manufacturer actually has such a webpage. Most of the usual places I had already checked. And yes, it was still synching, so it had to be in the house.

The final hint was to download a Bluetooth device locator onto my phone. Well, not an actual locator, but a meter that tells you which Bluetooth devices are communicating with your phone, and their signal strength. I loaded the software and turned on my laptop. It showed up right away, with a strong signal. Then, there was my tracker, a weak signal, but there!

As I walked away from the computer, the signal weakened, but the tracker's got stronger. As I walked further away from the computer the tracker got stronger and stronger, until I was standing in front of my closet. The closet in which I had placed freshly laundered clothes a few hours earlier. AH HA!

The hunt wasn't as easy as I expected. The tracker and its wristband were not just lying on the closet floor. In fact, the signal at the floor was weaker. Above the closet pole it was also weaker. Apparently the tracker was somewhere in the clothes. Eventually, I had to go through a bunch of items where the signal was the strongest, and there it was, my black wristband, securely fastened to the sleeve of a black shirt by the famous hook and loop fastener that was supposed to keep it around my wrist. Apparently my tracker had jumped ship and attached itself to the nearest arm and hung there, like a bat, snoozing.

My relief was twofold. First I was happy to find this expensive electronic gadget. Second, I realized that this was just "one of those things" on "one of those days" that had nothing to do with memory loss, short term or otherwise. In fact, I think I burned some new neural pathways playing detective and utilizing some new software. But perhaps the most important thing I learned today is that someone loves me enough to dump out two cans of smelly garbage to look for something we both thought I had mindlessly misplaced. And you can't complain about that.

Marking Time

Let's face it. From the day we are born, we are marking time. First, in the calendar way, by checking off the milestones brought to us by the passing of days. Birthdays, anniversaries, holidays. I absolutely love the calendar and its dependable way of rotating around to bring me again and again to those familiar dates and events. There is the life plan way of marking time, laying out all the stages of life we expect to experience — education, career, family life— and a myriad of touchstones along the way.

Then there is marking time in the marching band/military way. Standing in place, feet moving in regimented step, knees up, eyes ahead. "Mark Time, MARCH!" And you stay there until further orders tell you to halt, or move forward. I was great at marching in a group, whether it was with the Rifle-ettes (doing a mean Queen Anne's salute with our wooden mock rifles) or with my high school band, forming letters and shapes on the football field (all the while playing clarinet.)

As a parent, I have marked time with the developmental milestones of my children, their stages of life and now, repeating that with grandchildren. I've become good at it, except, perhaps in my working life. Many times I have found myself out of step, doing an About Face, or watching the squad move on without me. Career-wise, the concept of marking time by soldiering on in place didn't boost me up many rungs of the ladder; perhaps, as the saying goes; when it came to career, I really just wanted to march to the beat of my own drummer.

I am trying to find out how to do that and still pay the rent, especially now, as I stare down another milestone; one that is moving at me steadily as the calendar days pass by. Its approach is signaling a time of assessing where all this marching has led me, both personally and professionally.

The band is playing, the sergeant is shouting, and the parade ground is waiting.

Déjà vu All Over Again

Thomas Edison is quoted as saying that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting the same results. It is a pretty good thing to remember in science and in life, but it doesn’t go far enough. At first read, one may be lead to believe that there is never any sense in doing something over and over again. That there is no difference in GETTING the same result and EXPECTING the same result. I think of this as I find myself entertaining thoughts of once again reinventing myself. Something I have done over and over again; something I’ve repeated despite not always getting the results I expected.
 

My first reinvention was probably when I left home at age 18. I reinvented myself from being the Hero Child of a dysfunctional family, and recreated myself as an Independent Person. The road I put myself on was rocky. I made what I have felt for years was a regrettable decision, not going to college. I struck out with virtually no family support system, no money, no job and nowhere to live. Eventually, most of those things fell in line. My second reinvention involved allowing myself to be absorbed by the interests, activities and friends of the person who would become my husband. I willingly buried my own interests and distanced myself from personal friends. It was a life that went along quite well for a while. When it ended there was another reinvention into Single Mom and the emotional roller coaster that entails. And that reinvention lasted through the teenage years of my children and stayed with me as they went off to college. 

Then came the reinvention of 2009. Being laid off from a career that I had been pursuing with intensity was like having my legs knocked out from under me.  I lost my self-identification, my passion and my self-confidence. It happened exactly at the same time as I was going through the proverbial Empty Nest Syndrome. Basically, I felt like no one needed me anymore. Never mind the financial upheaval from which I am still recovering.  Trying to reinvent myself back into a sane, solvent, and independent person took a long time. I haven’t recovered all the way, and I now accept that some of the changes to me are permanent. There is no going back to the person I was prior to 2009. 

Finding a soul mate since then has done much for me, and I hope as much for him. Now having the kind of partnering relationship that I never had before has not changed the bumps in the road, but has made me realize how much easier it is to face those bumps with another person in your corner. It helped me find the courage and determination to reinvent myself yet again in 2010, when laughter and humor became for me a focus of study, practice and professional development. Suddenly, that college degree I never finished became less important as I embraced learning for the sake of learning, not for a piece of paper. I have expanded my knowledge, my mind, my experiences and my outlook in the past 5 years. I have gone from worrying about if people need me, to knowing that they love me; and therein lies the real purpose of life.

So now, to paraphrase Yogi Berra, it is déjà vu all over again. Stalking age 60 gives me the “I have done this before” feeling. And I realize that doing the same thing over and over again can be a wonderful, life affirming experience. And that is because you never really do the exact same thing again — your life, like a river, is never the same, even if you step into at the same place again and again. The water, and the river, keep flowing.  And this time, as I get ready to dive back into that river of reinvention, I can’t wait to see what I become.

Blog Action Day 2014 - "Inequality"

Please see my post from October 15, 2014; my reflections about "Unfinished Business," including thoughts about equality and other global issues that remain "Unfinished."