Customer Service Quotables

There are two great customer service gaffes to be found via recent postings at BoingBoing and Waxy (12.28).

The first is from the Wired blog, in which the author documents canceling his subscriptions to Napster, Rhapsody and Yahoo Music. The process of canceling Napster proved to be the most time-consuming (30 minutes) and humorous:

When she took me off hold again, I told her I wanted to cancel because 2007 was the year 3 of the major labels started selling music without DRM. Back on hold.

She came back — presumably after consulting a manager or the internet to find out what DRM is — and then responded, “I don’t understand, because all of our music contains DRM.”

The second comes from loyal (formerly) Palm user Tristan Louis. When his Treo started having problems, he called tech support prepared for the normal rigmarole. He asked for and was transferred to the initial service rep’s supervisor, and when he made the same request to this second rep:

She told me she was the most senior person at Palm. I asked her again politely to transfer me to her manager. She told me she had none. I asked to be transfered to the person that was reviewing her work, giving her assignments, etc.. I was told she had none. I told her I felt that was odd as, apart from the chairman and CEO, I didn’t know of anyone in a company not having a manager. She told me she was the CEO.

[emphasis mine]

In case you didn’t notice, the pronoun used throughout the quote is “she”. Palm’s current CEO is Ed Colligan

After confirming her statement and requesting permission to record their conversation, Tristan found the line dead.

Both customer service quotes are gems.