Serving Customers, Helping America

Caution: this is going to be a rant. I don’t see how I can make anything heavenly about it, so if you expect the w.h.a.m.m. you may be disappointed.

I had occasion recently to call a credit card company’s customer service number. It should not surprise anyone that the voice which answered sounded distinctly Indian. To their credit, the bank had found someone who was able to speak understandable English, more or less. After the standard greeting and informing me that her name was [unrecognizable,] she asked for my sixteen digit account number. Rant one: I had already entered my account number via the keypad in order to access her department. Why is it that the computer which recognized my account number could not also send it to the screen of the person taking the call?

Rant two: despite the fact that her English was passable, she had trouble understanding the nature of my problem. I speak a little French, so I can put together a sentence or two which I suspect sound “passable.” However, if a French speaker responded to me at conversational speed, I would be clueless. I think this was [unrecognizable’s] problem. I tried to make her understand that the account which they were attempting to collect was issued to a now defunct business. Pretend the business dba was Michigan Disposal Center. The card was issued to Michigan D Center. The struggling service rep wanted to know if the person named on the card now resided at a different address. I repeated that it was not a person, but a business. She countered by asking if I knew the new address of the person named on the card. I repeated that the card was not issued to a person, but to a business which is no longer in existence. And around we went… again and again. She couldn’t grasp that first name, Michigan, middle initial D, last name Center did not exist – had never existed as a person.

Rant three: we have a huge employment problem in the United States. It seems anti-American to hire foreign workers when so many of our own are un- or underemployed. The technology exists, I believe, to route call center contacts to any phone in the universe. (They send them to India.) Why not pay a stay-at-home mom or dad to answer these calls? Via the wonders of the Internet, I can access just about any information a company would give me access to from my desktop in my study. Could companies hire our own citizens to do this work at home? This would kill three birds with one stone: it gets rid of the irksome language issue and employs US citizens while keeping people like me from needing to rant. I would be much more likely to become a repeat customer of a company which did not flaunt its anti-American policies through its customer service options.

I am not anti-globalist or hyper-protectionist. I know we need the global economy to survive. But I am not alone in thinking that the profit motive has spawned a cancerous attitude in many corporate board rooms. A recent article in Reader’s Digest suggested that a sizable portion of the US citizenry would pay “a little more” for American made products understanding that it meant jobs for fellow citizens. I know I would.