Dec

Customer Service?

Posted by admin under UP

Every once in awhile. calling Customer Service is actually fun, but maybe not for the reason you hoped.

For accepting Visa and Mastercard to sell my CDs, I’m charged a percentage of sales, plus authorization fees, transaction fees, statement fees, batch fees, and some other fees I think they copied from the electric bill. Once a month I get a statement in the mail (from some place called First Data, on behalf of Citibank) which was obviously designed by evil trolls in Albania, who have at best a passing acquaintance with math and English. To say it’s complicated and confusing is like saying a Great White Shark bite is inconvenient. Multiply your phone bill by two or three times, and you get the idea.

For example, it says “Grand Total” in three places, and they’re all different numbers. Additionally, all the above mentioned fees vary, depending on the credit card’s type, its status, and the cardholder’s opinion of the current soybean crop.

One day, having had a good night’s sleep and feeling especially buoyant, I decided to call merchant services for a statement decipherization. The first person I talked to, Emmanuel, tried for 20 minutes, bless his foreign soul, but couldn’t explain it. I asked for his supervisor and Claudia got on the phone. After several attempts she was able to make it make sense to me, in the way that String Theory makes sense to a Tibetan weaver.

Feeling proud of myself for maintaining my composure and reasonably good mood, I generously suggested that it might be helpful and considerate to make the statements more easily understandable to us average college graduates who are not CPAs. Her response, and I swear this is true, was: “Well, if we made it easier to understand, they might not need us in customer service and some people would lose their jobs.”

That was the best laugh I had all day. I told her not to worry about losing her job. There will always be a place for her in the federal government.

Postscript:
(In all fairness, I need to add that a few hours later Claudia’s supervisor called me and apologized, letting me know that they’d had many complaints about the statements and were planning to simplify them. Unfortunately she had no idea when that might actually happen. I could tell from her tone that she was genuinely sorry, and it was obvious she was truly tired of having to deal with these calls about their Rubik’s Cube-esque statements.)