I’ve written here before about the abject failure of most technology implementations intended to assist in the delivery of customer service. And I know criticising customer service is such an easy target that it makes shooting fish in a barrel seem a highly skilled undertaking. Still, my experience last night with Rogers, one of Canada’s two major telecommunications and cable television providers, really did take the cake.

Now, Rogers is so pathetic at customer service that I used to have a Treo phone on its wireless network that consistently — and erroneously — told me the operation had failed every time I tried to perform a call-forwarding function. I lived with the problem for nearly four years rather than try to find the Rogers person who might be able to fix it.

Last night, I had to call them. Although the company has a web portal that is supposed to allow me to manage my wireless services, it almost never is able to do what I need it to do. If Rogers really cared about service, I would be able to do what I wanted to online or, at least, seamlessly switch from online self-service to an operator-assisted session, with that operator able to see what I had been trying to do, able to co-browse through the online portal with me and actually help me get what I need.

And lest you think I’m describing some kind of crazy wonderland here, let me assure you that the ability to do just that exists today in the form of our client ciboodle and its customer interaction software.

But enough of a client plug; back to my story.

I couldn’t get what I needed online so I had to call. (Insert shudder o’ loathsome horror here.) The IVR system was a little changed, and seemed to be intended to drive me to the right department within Rogers’s customer service operation so I followed it down the rabbit hole until it concluded I wanted to talk to someone about my business wireless service.

Sorry, Alice; wrong hole. The agent who answered asked me my name, pulled up a record, asked my postal code and said it didn’t match what was on his record. Of course it didn’t because, helpful IVR notwithstanding, he had pulled up my residential cable account, not my business wireless service. And then he knew almost nothing about what I wanted, which was to upgrade my data plan, and I had to tell him what his own product offerings were so he could sell them to me.

But at least I eventually got what I needed. I wasn’t even that minimally successful with Black & Decker, whose online store was also my starting point yesterday to source a new battery for my cordless grass trimmer. Unable to find the product anywhere online, I used a form to send an email asking where I might find a replacement battery. I listed my part number and the model number of the trimmer and asked where online I could find one or who here in Ottawa, Canada, might stock them.

I received a reply in suspiciously swift order and, sure enough, it had all the hallmarks of a machine-generated — and therefore nearly useless — response. Not only was it hopelessly generic, it actually directed me to click on a URL that took me to one of those advertising services that squat on like-sounding domain names, in this case www.blackanddeckertools.com.

Dear Black & Decker: Do you care so little about your brand and its reputation that you can be so careless in safeguarding it? Do you have so many customers that you can afford to send them to a wholly unaffiliated domain-name squatter? Is this maybe one reason why your stock price is languishing near its 52-week low, about two-thirds of what it was a year ago? Does lousy customer service damage the bottom line?

Just another day in customer service paradise, I guess.

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