Major Companies
Consider Revision Of Recorded Messages For
Customers Waiting For A Call To Be Answered
A recent survey of its
members by the UK consumer group, Which?, has
identified the most annoying elements of recorded
messages played to customers who are waiting for
their calls to be answered.
The most irritating phrase
contains a reassurance that the caller is a
“valued customer”.
It was not so much the
statement that upset people but the clear lack of
sincerity that was inevitable inherent in a
recorded message that could be heard by anyone.
As a result, a new, more
evidently sincere, recorded message is being
trialled by several major companies in the south
of England.
If no staff are available,
callers hear the following:
Thank you for calling our company. No staff
are currently available to take your call.
We’re not going to
tell you that your custom is valued. We don’t
know who you are yet, for God’s sake. You
might be some whinging complainer with a
personality disorder – God knows we get
enough of those in these days when every consumer
believes they’re the most important person
in the world with a near psychopathic passion.
You might even be an automated PPI scam for all
we know.
If you’re
enormously rich and your call could lead to
vastly increased profits for our company, then
please press one on your keypad. You might be
Richard Branson, for example. If you’re
Rupert Murdoch, however, just hang up now. Our
company may be profit driven, but we’re not
without some sense of ethics and common decency.
When you press one on
your keypad, we will log your number, so if you’re
pissing us about and try that stunt more than
once, your calls will be blocked.
If one of our products
has caused a big, big problem, then please press
two on your keypad. For example, if we’ve
sold you a mobile phone and it blew up, downing a
747 over the Atlantic, we might be able to come
to some financial arrangement with you to keep
your mouth shut.
If you’re anybody
else then you might like to just hang on until
more of our customer care advisers turn up for
work.
Any delay in having
your call answered is your own fault anyway. You
all complained when our call centres were in
India. Well, at least our staff arrived on time
in those days because the Indians have got a
reliable train service. Now this call centre’s
in southern England, we’re all at the mercy
of those flat-capped luddites who staff Southern
Rail.
Bring back Margaret
Thatcher, we say. The rail union needs to be
crushed in the way Thatcher crushed the NUM
before the whole country gets taken over by
unelected, self-interested, Britex voting,
thickos with no grasp of the larger economic
picture. Do they think their wages grow on trees
that are independent of the financial viability
of the companies they work for?
We want to add that we’re
not exactly disinterested in your custom, it’s
just that it probably doesn’t matter if a
few of you hang up and never contact us again as
long as not too many of you follow suit.
Anyway, as you’re
paying for this call and it’s probably cost
you three quid already, you might want to hang up
and try your luck again later.
If you'd like to hang
on, we’ll play you some distorted music that
you probably wouldn’t normally choose to
listen to before we repeat the original message
again. Enjoy.
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