Steve McGuinness
Special to Niagara Now/The Lake Report

We have all experienced the time-consuming frustration of waiting in a customer service queue after we call a 1-800 number. 

We try to find escape routes and detours around these time-wasting blockades. A few times, we may succeed, but more often than not, we fail.

I have concluded that the design principle underlying all of them is to frustrate customers so thoroughly that we hang up, abandoning all service attempts, forever and ever, amen.  

While trapped in these queues, a recorded voice keeps repeating, “Your call is important to us and has been placed in a priority sequence” every 20 seconds. This statement is most assuredly not true.

If the call was truly important, they would hire sufficient staff to answer the calls promptly to shield our exposure to their awful “music” while we wait.

To be fair, they may attempt to recruit more underpaid staff, but they keep quitting faster than they can be replaced, due to the stress of coping with angry customers venting.  

Some of the newer tools designed to speed up service actually seem to make the bottlenecks worse. Voice recognition technology, for example, has replaced the menus providing pre-set numbered options to help route our call.

The problem is that these systems don’t seem to be able to clearly recognize any standard English voice commands. God forbid if you have a speech impediment or are not a native English speaker.

When you say you want to cancel your service, they interpret it as, “We think you want to add more services.”

Those wanting to cancel service get the lowest priority and greatest runaround. Expect your call to be transferred to at least four “specialists” trained in interrogation with advanced torture techniques.  

We also have to deal with call centre offshoring to cut costs because management has decided that paying minimum wage workers to take calls at home, while tending to wailing infants, is insufficiently cost-effective.

So we now require a master’s degree in linguistics to decipher a myriad of foreign accents.

The other message repeated ad nauseam urges us to hang up and provide self-service by going to a website instead. Never fall for this bait-and-switch tactic. Their website labyrinth is invariably harder to navigate and escape than their telephone service maze.  

A neighbour of mine is a call centre work survivor. She gave me a great “insider” tip to get faster and better service.

Call centre employers pay a premium to retain French-speaking staff. These bilingual employees remain working at the call centre longer, gaining more experience, collecting the higher pay rate.

She recommended that I press “2” for service in French, ignoring that I’ve forgotten all my grade nine Français. After trying this several times now, I can confirm that it works like a charm.

They answer “bonjour” and I reply “hello.” They then switch over to English and provide a much higher calibre of service.  

Try these tips next time to see if any work for you.  

In his Bay Street career, Steve McGuinness was a senior advisor to large financial institutions and is now retired in NOTL. Send your personal financial planning questions to him at smcgfinplan@gmail.com.