Welcome to The Hoosier Illuminati. Macintosh bigot, clothes horse, motorsports fanatic (as long as they turn right), Anglophile.

Clothes and manners do not make the man; but when he is made, they greatly improve his appearance. --Arthur Ashe

Is a response really so much trouble?

I’ve wanted to buy some new calling cards for a while.  My old cards have some information that really isn’t all that relevant anymore and I just wanted to get some new ones. 

I found a company on-line that had a very nice card at a reasonable price and a quick Googling of their company’s name indicates that they do nice work.  With debit card in hand I started to fill out the online form and discovered that the line where I wanted to put my e-mail address and cell number has a 30 character limit and I wanted to place 32 characters there. 

“No problem,” says I, “they have a contact form here, I’ll just see if we can modify the font size to allow for a couple more characters, it shouldn’t be a big problem.”

Silence.

This was a couple of days ago now, still no reply. 

I’m not asking for much here, just to give me the courtesy of a reply, even if it’s a quick, “No, we’re sorry, but that’s not a modification we can make to that design,” would have been quite sufficient. 

Silence.

In the mean time I found another printer online, a new one and one that is significantly more expensive, but they were very prompt about answering a question I had about font styles.  Guess who gets the business? 

I’ll always pay more for good service.  An inexpensive product is worthless if the producer is unwilling to make even a token gesture of support. 

Comments

For a country that has supposedly made the change from an industrial economy to a service economy, I don’t see many examples of good service. It’s virtually impossible to speak to a real live human being when you call your bank or anyone else these days. Everybody is too busy to take your call and you leave a voicemail hopeful that whomever you left the message for will have the decency to call you back. Sometimes you even get called back the same day you leave the message.

I hate Wal-Mart for a lot of reasons, but mostly because if you need anything while shopping there, it takes half an hour to find someone who works there who isn’t running a cash register. Then count on another half hour for that person to find someone who can actually answer your question. I was born about forty years too late.

Most of the time when you talk to someone in support or service you’re speaking to someone in India anyway.  I’m not sure what our economy has transformed into, but it’s certainly not service. 

You must have a very different Wal-Mart than we do.  At our Wal-Mart the trouble is finding someone who DOES run a cash register.  It doesn’t matter how busy the place is, there will be two and only two open registers in a store that has twenty of the bloody things.  But I digress.

My company insists that someone speak to a human being.  Calls are always answered by a receptionist and if they’re asking to speak to a particular person in either sales or customer service who is not available they are always given the option of speaking to someone else before they’re routed to voicemail.  It’s not hard to do, we’ve just forgotten how to do it because e-mail and voicemail are so simple. 

I think technology has made us rude.

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