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Customer disservice: All we want is to talk to a real human being

Why should we give our money to banks and service providers when they refuse to provide real people to help you when you have a question for them?

It's no fun talking to a steady stream of machines. Graphic: Getty Images

Liam Collins

July 03 2022 02:30 AM

I was in the middle of painting a room when Stephen, a nice guy from the phone company, called looking to collect an unpaid mobile phone bill.

He’s not the only one. Revenue, the mortgage provider, various insurance companies and utilities are queuing up to collect unpaid direct debits and standing orders and charging me fees when they are returned unpaid.

No, I haven’t gone bankrupt, thankfully.

It’s just that the ‘bank of you’ has decided that it is now the ‘bank of you are on your own’, and in a rush of blood to the head I decided to empty the account and close it forthwith.

Since then, life has been a misery.

I am on the phone constantly talking to a steady stream of machines and robots. In between trying to sell me more of their products that I don’t want, these empty voices keep giving me an endless supply of options and telling me that the phone calls are being recorded for ‘training purposes, analysis and verification.’

Who are they training? You can rarely talk to a living, breathing, person — and to get to that rarity you have to go through a labyrinth of machines that don’t even know your name, but want you to give them a string of personal information, including asking you to read out your credit card or debit card numbers.

The machines have inherited the earth and all their owners want is money, money, money.

I’ve just had a long call with one of these ‘service providers’ to pay a bill. It should be simple enough, but I had to press the No. 1 option on four different occasions, as a female robot with an American twang rolled out the possibilities of doing other business with them.

It is quite clear that after you have been signed-up for the direct debit or standing order — the difference between them remains a mystery to me — they want nothing more to do with you on a personal level, unless you stop paying them.

You, the customer, are a hindrance.

Everybody wants to deal with you through an app. I don’t do apps.

If I want to know what it’s going to be like tomorrow, I watch the weather forecast and then take my chances; if I want to get the bus, I walk to the bus stop; If I’m lost, I stop and ask somebody for directions and usually people are as helpful as possible. I once had a very enjoyable lunch, including a glass of wine, in Killashandra, Co Cavan, paid for by a fella from whom I asked directions.

When I’m in trouble, and I’m in trouble at the moment, I just want a living, breathing person on the other end of the phone line.

So, I’m old fashioned, probably a technophobe, and as far as I’m concerned I have a wrong-headed idea that a phone is for talking to other people when you can’t meet them personally.

Right now I’m also confused and cranky.

But why isn’t there anybody out there looking after the old, the confused and the cranky? We are the ones with steady money, own our own houses (mostly) and in most cases have a responsible attitude to life. We were brought up to believe that you paid your bills and if you owed money, you paid it back.

We’re not looking for any special favours, just to be treated with a bit of decency and not have vacant voices ordering us to do this, that and the other and press bloody hash keys to help us get through the labyrinth they have created to stop us annoying them.

I don’t want to look at my bank account or my phone usage or do any other sort of business “on the go”, as the robots keep urging me. Why would I bother, when I can read a newspaper or a book, do the crossword or chat to some stranger, even if everybody else is buried in their phones.

Maybe I should have paid more attention to all this internet stuff, but I suspect, like a lot of older people, I would never have figured it out anyway. I’ve even discovered that I’m paying for at least one service I never knew I had signed up for in the first place.

Why should we give our money to banks and service providers and then do all the work for them on apps and the like? Isn’t that what service was supposed to be about, the customer?

I have to say that if and when you finally do get through to a real person, they are, like Stephen, invariably polite and helpful. But getting to that point is often a bruising and painful experience. It also struck me that they put you through this torture when you want to talk to them, but when they want to talk to you about an unpaid bill they just pick up the phone and ring your number directly.

As for the ‘bank of you’ I called in person to see if they could bail me out before hightailing it out of the country. The woman I dealt with was very pleasant, but she couldn’t help me switch direct debits or standing orders. You couldn’t close the account if there was money owed and, no, she explained, there were no teams in place to help the old and the confused.

“But” she added, “You can do it all online — through the app.”

That was the final straw; they sucked me in and now they were blowing me out. So I closed the account and muttered “cheerio and f***, you” on the way out the door.

Customer disservice: All we want is to talk to a real human being

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