It's service with a smirk

CareerJournal.com, a website publication of The Wall Street Journal, issued a list earlier this year of the worst career fields. While cowboy, fisherman and dancer were on there, customer service representative was not. But other than the Secret Service guy whose job it is to put himself between the bullet and George W. Bush, could there be a lousier, more thankless job than working as a customer service representative?

Quite often customer service representatives are reviled before they even answer the phone, presumably because callers become irritable upon realizing they failed to obtain the Ph.D. necessary to crack the automated phone system codes that will allow them to speak to real live people.

Back in the good old days, pressing "0" was all that was needed to get an operator. Not anymore. Nowadays, more often than not pressing "0" will either beget a "That was an invalid entry" response, or pressing "0" will simply restart the menu of choices, thereby forcing the caller to listen - again - to a whole bunch of entirely useless options.

And anyone who's ever attempted to get a quick question answered via phone knows that there are few things in life more maddening than calling a bank, credit card company, phone company or catalogue and punching in an account number, order number, home telephone number, social security number, PIN number and/or mother's birthday - only to have to verbalize the exact same information as soon as a live operator gets on the line. Although they'll claim the repetition is necessary for the security of the caller, is there really any doubt that as soon as the conversation ends the phone operators are high-fiving each other and cackling about how much of the caller's time was successfully wasted?

The newest (and possibly most despicable) technological invention in the customer service industry is something called Interactive Voice Response. It's a software application that uses a combination of voice telephone input and touch-tone keypad selection to provide a suitable response in the form of a male or female voice that's not supposed to sound like what it so obviously is - a computer. It stands to reason that anyone who believes that the robot on the other end of the phone is a real live person also probably wishes for a punch in the mouth so as to merit a visit from the Tooth Fairy.

Then there's the politically incorrect nuisance of getting someone from a call center on the line (perhaps after listening to some mind-numbing hold music for seven to 12 minutes) and, upon hearing "Hello," realizing that English is perhaps the representative's fourth language and the United States is something they've only seen on maps and in the movies. While people all around the globe are certainly entitled to gainful employment, it can be wearisome to over-enunciate and spell the simplest words eight times in a row in order to accommodate the learning curve of the customer service representative's foreign-born ears and tongue.

And finally, there's the accountability factor. Some companies prohibit their representatives from revealing their last names. Others customer care agents don't have to tell callers in what city or state they're working. While some businesses allow their phone representative to share their extensions or employee identification numbers, a caller might not know to ask for such distinguishing features when perhaps feeling as if a particular customer service agent has been less than helpful, downright hostile, indifferent, useless or just not very bright. And sometimes when a question is asked of the representative (i.e. "What's your name?") or a supervisor is requested, the representative will simply hang up, rendering the customer powerless when calling back in an attempt to ensure that the representative's day becomes as miserable as the customer's has been made.

Yet while so many people crave live assistance on the phone, they're increasingly shunning being in the same rooms as other humans. Last weekend following Thanksgiving, which is the traditional start of the holiday shopping season, Internet sales were up 29 percent over the same period last year, while sales at traditional stores were down .05 percent from the post-Thanksgiving weekend in 2004.

Phone customer service representatives do seem to have a more enviable job than their counterparts in the field who have to encounter irate customers face to face. For example, some customer service agents have to tell people who just came off a prop plane after two unsuccessful attempts to land at the Aspen airport that the stand-by lists for the remaining four already oversold flights of the day are not created on a first come, first serve basis, rather passengers are ranked in the computer based on how much they paid for their tickets and how many miles are in their frequent flier accounts. In other words, there are people who choose to take jobs where they'll be forced (or, in the case of the people I encountered at Gate 61 at Denver International Airport last Sunday, delighted) to tell their customers it could very possibly be a day or two before they get home and no, they will not be given a dime for lodging or food since the flight was canceled due to poor visibility.

One company recently unveiled an innovatively retro gimmick to draw in new customers fed up with automated phone systems. Citibank is advertising a new program called Citi Simplicity: "Press '0' to speak to a live person. Anytime."

Just be careful what you wish for.

<i>Meredith Cohen wonders if any of the calls she's ever made were really monitored or recorded for training and development purposes and if so, can they be used against her in court? Questions or comments may be e-mailed to meredith_cohen@hotmail.com</i>