At the Daily Dish, Conor Friedersdorf Andrew Sullivan posts a letter from customer-service representatives -- some of the worst-paid employees in the private sector:
The most offensive customers are the ones who assume that CS reps are uneducated, have landed in their jobs because they have no other choice, and simply cannot provide help without an aggressive approach by the customer. The great majority of my co-workers in both of my jobs are college-educated, experienced in a lot of different life situations (including world travel, and a great variety of past jobs and professions) and are CS reps because they respect the companies they work for and believe in the product and services they sell and represent.
Friedersdorf Sullivan then posts his own letter to Verizon asking for fees to be reversed and promising, in return, his undying loyalty: "How I'd love to re-sign with my first wireless company (one whose Customer Service managers I'll have written to compliment the young prodigy who kept my business by waving a couple months of troublesome fees)."
I find that the reasons I call customer service are either to fix an error or, more often, to ask for an exception to the rules -- Can you reverse this or that fee? Can you change my flight without penalty? And I'm happiest when customer-service employees flout the rules. But this of course ends up costing the company money; reversing, for instance, bank fees may create some good will, but this is a substantial source of banks' income. The relevant question, for companies and their reps, is whether appeasing you in the short term costs less than losing your business altogether. It's a consideration that even those who "respect the [company] they work for and believe in the product and services they sell and represent" have to take into account.
But friends of mine who've worked at call centers and as customer-service reps have told me they often reverse fees and let customers off the hook because they don't care about the company -- after all, what did Bank of America ever do for them? I'd like to say that happy customer-service employees provide better service, but when you've used up as many get-out-of-jail free cards as I have, maybe it's better to get someone on the phone who wants to screw the company, too.
-- Gabriel Arana
