Bye, Bye 800 Numbers!

Why You Can’t Call the Company

I have been witness to the greatest technological changes of the human race. From space exploration to the internet to the smartphone. I have seen great inventions become obsolete.

Those toll-free 800 numbers were all the rave when they were introduced as long-distance calls were expensive due to tolls. But now, so much has changed, they are slowly fading away as they cost companies too much money and produce few productive calls.

People wonder what has happened to customer service and why they can’t find a phone number to call. When they are able to call, they fail to understand why the person they reach is in Mexico, India, or the Philippines where labor is cheap.

Americans have become spoiled by their technology, yet at the same time, many put too little effort into fully exploiting its full potential. It shows. The biggest problem with technology is people have so many different ways of interacting with it, including being passive-aggressive. Here is but a small list of the problems.

Just because you can call, does not mean you should call. But so many people call for so many stupid reasons. This is why if you call, you hit a long phone menu. The best option is to use online sources properly. In doing so, you may need two or more email addresses as well as a system for administering passwords, but it is worth the time to learn such things. Yes, I know you are on the road driving, but unless you know what you want, and are well prepared to be peppered with questions from the call center agent, you can be a real annoyance. If you are merely calling for how many miles you have in your airline membership program, you are an annoyance. Such information is easily available online or by phone app. Hey, even the homeless have mobile phones! You have little excuse not to engage technology!

Next, bad phone reception. If your phone service or phone sucks, make a point of being in a quiet place with good reception and be fully prepared to answer any question thrown at you to keep the call short. Unfortunately, many people call and get disconnected, if not hung up on, because the reception is bad and are poorly prepared for what they called for.

Gang calling! This is when the caller calls with multiple people with them. The end result is a very long call as 2 or more people are on the phone call asking questions about products and services. To the call center agent, these calls end up being very long and end up with no sales. This hurts the agent’s stats and the company bean counters will hold such agents accountable.

Privacy matters! The most despicable part about smartphones is the tremendous loss of privacy and how many people simply do not care. Please do not call when your family is in the middle of an argument over what to watch on TV. More importantly, please do not call when you are clearly in a bathroom where audible sounds of bodily waste being released can be heard. Also, stop chomping on those fritos! Do not call when your kids are screaming or dog is barking in the background, and do not call when construction work is making a lot of noise. Oh, and please do not call when you are drunk or high on meth or marijuana. Yes, the call agent can tell as you take too long to answer simple questions such as how to spell your name. Trust me, being drunk with a credit card and on the internet will result in many surprising things being delivered to your home and refunds won’t be honored!

If you call, have a credit card in your hands. And no debit card, please! Sales agents of so many businesses hate you if you call for prices and do not have a credit card on you. Why did you call? Sales reps for Omaha Steaks and travel sales agents hate you. They have a great time-sensitive rate for you but you do not have a credit card. For the hospitality industry, you are a horrible annoyance. You call in and are given a great price for airline flights, but you don’t have a credit card. You hang up and call an hour later to find out the prices are now double what you were quoted because availability has changed so you don’t buy. To these salespeople, you have given them two wasted calls. Oh, and telling them to hold while you run out to your car to get the credit card is hardly helpful and negatively impacts their stats. Please note, the company bean counters are taking notice. 

Phonetic spelling! If you love using phones, learn to phonetically spell words. Letters such as “T’, “P”, and “B” can sound the same. So can “S” and “F” as well as “B” and “V”. If you don’t pay attention to this, and your name is Beck or Sumner, do not be surprised if your order comes with your name as “Veck” and “Fumner”. “B” is for “boy”, “V” is for “victory”. Many people who have English as a second language have been made aware of this but so should you. See this list https://mi135.cap.gov/-training/phonetic-alphabet

The call agent is not your therapist! This stuns me for merely existing but many call-center workers have encountered this time and again, particularly with the pandemic. Someone calls in to order a food item merely because they are not certain if an item has peanuts in it. Suddenly, the caller has to talk about how their five-year-old daughter was exposed to peanuts at her preschool and was hospitalized and how traumatic it was for the girl and her family. After a 30-minute discussion, an order for a bag of popcorn is placed. As much empathy as the sales agent has, you have ruined their stats for the day. Company bean counters are noticing.

Genius-moron marriages. One of the enduring characteristics of a good marriage is when couples understand each other's strengths and weaknesses and yield accordingly to assist each other. But such couples are often of great annoyance to call centers as one spouse actually ends up handicapping the other. One spouse is absolutely brilliant with technology while the other is functionally illiterate to the point of being a Neanderthal. They call expecting a solution only to be told: both spouses need to have an email address to accomplish the task they are requesting but one spouse is so inept as to not have an email address at all. Guess who ends up teaching whom? Lots of time consumed: company bean counters are counting.

Calling the wrong number. People do not pay attention to what phone number they are calling. Perhaps they hit the wrong contact on their smartphone. An insurance agent received a phone call. The caller was calling for pizza. Because of the caller ID, the insurance agent, who handles claims, knew who the caller was. The caller was not paying attention and said, “Hey Pizza Hut, I want to order a big pizza”. The insurance agent merely pulled up the website, took the caller’s order, and placed the order. The insurance agent had tried to explain, but why argue? Customer served, but not for the insurance company.

Impatience! You sent in information through the website. You don’t receive a response within an hour or a day. So you call. Guess what? You created two issues for the business. Eventually, some worker will get your email and realize your issue was resolved and you have wasted their time. Also, to the phone agent, you have wasted their time for not waiting. Why did you not wait? Here, the company bean counters need to be kicked in the rear. Emails and texts should be responded to as quickly as possible as it makes everyone happier! Yet, patience is still a virtue! Learn patience.

To be fair, it is not just the customer. Many call centers now have people working from home. Yes, the agent puts you on hold, but not to assist you. They retrieve food they have in the microwave, or to use the bathroom, or check the mail, or whatever. Company bean counters notice.

From all this, you can see why smart companies are doing away with phone numbers. Customer service is being abandoned. The human contact we all crave is going away because people do not follow proper etiquette and protocol.