If corporations really cared about customers they might answer our phone calls | Peter Goers

We’ve all heard it 123 million times and every time it makes you want to scream, writes Peter Goers.

‘Your call is important to us” is one of the great lies.

You’re endlessly on hold on the phone to some major company and you’re constantly told how important your call is and how valuable your time is and you’re listening to terrible tinkly music or pop songs repeated nauseatingly.

Then you scream into the phone (expletives deleted) “if my call is so important to you …. answer the phone and take my call!!!!!”

And it’s getting worse.

Australians are now wasting 123 million hours on hold on our phones. Why? Because companies don’t care about their customers.

It seems whenever you call a major corporation a recorded message tells you that they “are experiencing higher than usual demand” which means and seems to excuse an even longer waiting time on hold.

Is this another lie? A con? We are constantly thanked for waiting. Don’t thank us just answer the (expletive deleted) phone.

My experience is that banks are the worst but then I rarely call a telco (thank goodness) and my experience calling Telstra has been relatively express but other customers report agonisingly long waits.

Recently I had to call my bank – the ANZ – in a scamming emergency and I waited 57 minutes and 42 seconds on hold.

Despite its name, Medibank Private used to be publicly owned. That’s why I chose it.

Then the Abbott Government privatised it and now it’s called just Medibank (even though it’s actually privately owned).

I called recently with an inquiry and was informed by a recorded message that Medibank was not taking calls and I must go on an app or communicate by text.

There’s a major company which declines to take your call at all. The customer is always wrong.

We are required or encouraged to communicate with a bot rather than a person because the bot is vastly cheaper than employing humans so the company can make even more money by not employing people.

If you do call you are punished by having to wait. Tortured by corporate indifference. You’ve generally gone though a menu of options and while waiting I fantasise about my options.

Press 1 if you are tired of waiting. Press 2 if you want to scream. Press 3 if you are thinking of murder. Press 4 if you feel you’d rather have a root canal filling or watch the Crows win a showdown than wait on hold. Press 5 to pray. Press 6 if you are crying.

Companies don’t care about customers. They care about their shareholders. They make eye-watering profits by stuffing their customers around.

The ANZ Bank makes nearly $7bn profit per year and the big 4 Australian banks make nearly $30bn profit per year by charging extortionate interest rates, closing branches, replacing tellers with machines, sending call centres offshore and not employing enough people to take your call should you risk making a call.

It’s not the workers’ fault and most often when you – finally – get to speak to someone – generally overseas and generally a Filipino or Indian, they are considerate, obliging and efficient.

Communicating with bots is exasperating. No matter how clearly you speak you are told “sorry I didn’t hear that”. Why can’t we speak to actual humans?

Nobody wants to talk to you anymore and we are constantly de-socialised. You can no longer call a suburban post office.

The Adelaide Festival Centre receptionist is no longer allowed to connect you to anyone.

So we wait.

We put our lives on hold so major corporations can blithely stuff us around. At least the hands-free speaker phone means you can do something else while you wait.

The wait becomes a challenge.

If you hang up and call back later you’ve wasted the time you’ve already spent waiting. You think, “I won’t let this beat me” but it often does.

The lack of service and respect for the customer is galling and we live with the lie that our call is important to them.

Since the longest recorded time on hold on the phone is 15 hours and 40 minutes (to an airline), anything less than that is a bonus.

In hell everyone will be on the phone on hold. Forever. And all those calls will be important to the very devil himself.

Originally published as If corporations really cared about customers they might answer our phone calls | Peter Goers