Your feedback is important …

Online shopping for Christmas brings us into contact with internet ‘staff’ who say yes when they really mean no.

‘How was your experience today? Please fill in our questionnaire.’

Online shopping for Christmas or just paying bills or ordering hedge clippers … You name it. These past weeks I’ve been caught in a whirlpool of new relationships. Not with friendly, chatty souls but smug, stuck-up sorts who listen to not a word I say. At least if you go to a bricks-and-mortar store, as old-fashioned retailers are now called, you can speak your piece and even if the service is rude and uncaring, it’s somehow preferable to dealing with internet “staff” that say yes when they really mean no. I‘d rather be told to sod off than be insulted by insincerity.

 It goes like this. I unsubscribe from a leading department store chain’s newsletter because I receive a flood of offers every day and I am not even sure I subscribed in the first place. But I can’t unsubscribe unless I explain why. Susan: “I am unsubscribing because you send too many emails and I am sick of getting alerts about bargains on men’s underwear and golf clubs. Thank you.” Department store: “Your feedback is important to us and we look forward to continuing to offer you our highest levels of service.” Ten minutes later: Ads for said department store’s bargains on men’s underwear and golf clubs start to infest my Google searches for other goods that are not associated with any such items.

 How was your experience today? Please fill in our questionnaire. How can we improve our customer service? OK, challenge taken for that particular question. I call the so-called Help Line of a certain city council about an absentee ballot form just received by mail. I can’t complete said form because it requires me to provide my answer to my secret question, which isn’t listed. I have no memory of ever having a secret question. I am number 12 in the queue, says an automated voice, and the waiting time is 24 minutes. How do they know? Can they estimate the length of each query or are callers simply zapped into Cyberspace after two minutes? Only one way to find out. I wait on the line in front of my computer and study the freshly popped ads for the finer points of Santa jocks with merry little reindeers racing across the crotch.

I am suddenly connected. Oh, OK, that was only eight minutes, so a lot of callers have been given short shrift. Deep breath. Launch into my dissatisfaction regarding secret questions. “Oh ignore it,” says the perky clerk. “But …” I venture. She tells me it’s optional and she’s had a lot of complaints but, really, what can you do? I point out you could get it right in the first place. Click. She’s gone. My feedback is unimportant, she isn’t programmed to pretend she gives a flying sleigh, hasn’t asked if I’d like membership of the city council’s frequent complainers’ club, hasn’t wished me a good day. She’s probably off for her golf lesson. Go, girl.