Customer Disservice

I feel I have officially entered "Old Fogey Codgerville" because I am continuously dissappointed and upset by the incredibly poor service we experience almost everywhere.

We bought our new vehicle from a very chipper and upbeat "Gen Y" fellow who seemed unable to hear/understand and deliver on our expectations (i.e, when you get the phone call that your new car is "all ready for pick-up", you don't expect to arrive and spend 2.5 more hours while they dick around with final prep). It was clear truck sales is not his dream job; he really came to life telling us about his true passion for marine biology and studying whales. We were told to expect to receive a customer satisfaction survey and that ticking anything other than "Complete Satisfaction" constituted a failing mark for him. Suffice it to say the survey will be going in the garbage. We weren't completely satisfied and I have no confidence they would understand what we felt they needed to do to improve. We told him verbally several times what our expectations were and how to meet them, and it all fell on deaf ears.

I can't seem to convince my Internet Service Provider (ISP) that hosts my business e-mail and .com site to permanently give me adequate memory space on their server. They expand it for a while, and then rejig something on their servers, my space gets reduced, and business e-mail starts bouncing back undeliverable. I really need to switch ISPs, but feel in my heart it's likely I will have problems with any ISP to whom I give my business. I just don't have a lot of faith that anyone knows what they are doing, especially in tech area.

My husband has been living a nightmare with the phone company (Telus). He dropped his cell phone in the water, so needed a new one. Telus's website and phone support leave a lot to be desired. No matter when you phone them, you get the message that "call volumes and wait times are higher than expected" and then you spend hours getting bounced around, sometimes cut off, and poor, inattentive service when you do get a live person on the phone.

In John's case, he ordered a new phone and specified in some detail that he wanted a flip phone (i.e., covered buttons so it doesn't "pocket dial") and the Telus rep assured him that's what he was getting. John checked later on what had been recommended and ordered for him, and it was NOT a flip phone, and customer reviews complained it "pocket dialled" - in other words it was exactly what he had said he did not want. He called back and waited all over again to explain and correct the problem.

The new phone finally arrived and he was unable to get it activated by using the website. He had to call Telus, wait in that purgatory of a phone queue, argue with them about their ridiculous $25.00 fee to turn his new phone on and, when they did do an activation (by a supervisor!) they activated an old Samsung phone he used to have and not the new one they just sent him, so he had to call again and repeat the whole process to get this corrected. I sincerely thought his head was going to explode.

On top of the cell phone nonsense, our Telus wireless modem at the cottage isn't working and it took another 3 hours with two technicians before they were finally convinced to comply with John's original request to simply send us a new modem. Fingers crossed it works when it arrives.

That's my venting. No solutions in sight. Seems you just have to expect problems these days, and be pleasantly surprised if there aren't screw ups.

Todo bien. (It's all good.)