Customer Service Masquerade
Quick observation about completely nonexistent customer service in 2024:
SCE (the electric utility company Southern CA Edison, you know, the one who charges an obscene amount for power and yet can’t manage its equipment well enough to keep it from burning CA to the ground on what seems like a yearly basis and therefore agreed to pay over half a billion dollars in penalties for causing 5 different catastrophic wildfires in southern California in the last few years? Yeah, that one) had the unmitigated gall to email a survey to me regarding a customer service phone call that only occurred after hours of internets research required on my part in order to find the secret phone number. The phone number that doesn’t appear anywhere on their fucking website. Normally, I would not take the time to participate in a survey, but this has become the sad standard for every operation upon which we rely for some type of service. Phone, internet, satellite TV, banking, finance, and the mother of all inefficiency, the DMV, et al. And that is, force paying customers to do their own work and invest their own time to solve a problem that they didn’t create or find information regarding the very service for which the company is being paid. Providing the least possible amount of ‘service’ while hiding the needed information behind an impenetrable wall of robots, “did you know you can” recordings, sales pitches, countless useless options and a general veil of secrecy around the process of reaching a human being. So, I said fuck it, here’s your survey. I copied my response below, for anyone recently enraged by a similar experience.
ok sce ....actually i can't believe that you offer this survey for the few people who manage to find out how to reach a human on the phone....but since you do, here goes....the woman w whom i spoke was very helpful, knowledgeable and interestingly, understood my frustration w the difficulty of reaching her...i made a joke about the byzantine process that is clearly designed to make it virtually impossible to speak to a person and she joked that 'everyone says that' ...so...that should be all you need to know about the cust service that you provide….it's fucking shitty….actually it’s a joke…a very unfunny joke….however...i am quite sure that you do not care ..or it wouldn't be designed as is....so the problem is not w the people that you employ to provide cust service ...it's the cheap ass system that you designed to try to force people to do the work themselves and rely on robotic recordings and computers instead of paying a human being to be available to speak to your customers ...the work and time that i put in to find out how to get this woman on the phone was absurd ...put a fucking ph number on your website that allows someone to reach a human to answer questions about your enormous charges ...or....don't...just don't pretend to care about cust service
Post script: We recently moved outside of LA proper, to the edge the wild. Our home is surrounded by mountains and is considered a ‘high fire risk area’ by the few insurers who are still willing to do business in CA. Just the kind of place that SCE has torched in the last half decade from negligence. But, maybe, good news. The other day I ran into a group of guys wearing day glo vests and hard hats flying a drone on our neighboring street. I stopped and talked. They were surveying the electrical wires and poles in our area for possible weaknesses, the kind that can cause wildfires. Contractors hired by SCE. Guess they decided better to pay to maintain equipment than drop half a billion in penalties for ruining lives and killing people. What a novel idea. Congrats, and don’t forget to pass that maintenance cost on to the customers.