Customer Service?More Like Customer Wankery!

In theory technology should be making our life easier and for the most part I’ve personally found this to be true. But there’s one area I’m quickly discovering that is becoming increasingly more frustrating. Anyone care to take a stab at what it may be?

If you answered Customer Service (And I use the term ever so lightly, to have service one must be served, and I am yet to be served) you are correct, please follow me to the gift shop and choose your prize.

Those who know me or who have ever read any of my previous blogs would probably know I’m a bit of a guitar hero nut. I listen to podcasts, visit forums, I’ve even made a fake neck from cardboard to practice my finger placement on the fret board. So as you may imagine with the release of Guitar Hero: World Tour (Think Guitar Hero with Bass, Vocals and Drums as well) I was bouncing off the walls.

I was like an excited child on Christmas morning when I finally got the game but I may as well have been given coal as it would have worked just as well as the drum kit I received in the box. Unfortunately I was not the only one this happened to. Red Octane (the manufacturer of the game), have already acknowledge that they released the game knowing that a lot of the drum kits have a variety of issues (sensitivity, pads not working, cross talking…) and promptly released a statement and a fix on their website.

I bought the game knowing full well that I’m likely to have problems with the drum kit but I was quite confident that Red Octane’s solution would fix my problems. Out of the box my kit didn’t register hits and eventually one of the pads just stoped working. So I went over to Red Octane’s support site to get the appropriate tools to fix my kit.

This is where my both my problems and issues with customer service began.
Straight off the bat I was screwed. The apparent fix for my drums was a magical cable (USB-Midi for those who actually care) that Red Octane are supposed to send out at their own expense was not available for me to request in Australia, they were only posting them out to the US and Canada. I waited 2 or 3 more days and tried again but Australia still wasn’t listed on the warranty claims list for this particular cable. Eventually, to my delight they released the cable in Australia so I started to fill out my warranty request.

10 minutes later I almost put my fist through my monitor. After filling out all my details and selecting to send my request I was given an error message that read: “I’m Sorry But We Are Unable To Process Your Request At This Time”. That’s all it said, no reason why not even an error code, just the text taunting me like a school yard bully. So I waited maybe an hour or two and tried again… and again… and again.

3 days later I was still unable to request any help and was still getting the same error message. Feeling quite defeated I took screenshots of the error that kept coming up for future reference. I trawled through the site praying to find a contact number but the best I could come up with was an email address. I attached the screenshot to an email and sent it to Red Octane with all the relevant information. It’s now been a month and I’ve still heard nothing back. Not that their lack of response it surprises me mind you. Since then I went and purchased the cable (from Ebay. Thanks for nothing Red Octane you jerks!) and the kit is still broken and have since had to send the entire kit back for repairs/replacement.

I can’t help but think if I could have got in contact with an actual person they could have pointed me in the right direction to fix my kit and all this messing around could have been avoided (not that Red Octane care of course). I feel pretty bad for all the little kiddies and their parents who are going to have to go through all the same problems come Christmas time, what ever happened to QA and standards?

The tip of the iceberg today was when I was trying to contact my bank to extend the limit on my credit card (*shakes fists* curse you Christmas!). When I was connected I got the usual automated response of something along these lines: ”please press one to select this option, press two to select that option…”. This went on for about 5 minutes (Do Commonwealth bank charge you for those calls?) when I finally got the option to select to speak to an operator, you know, a real person it went pear shaped. Turns out I was a little ahead of myself. I was placed on hold for maybe another minute or so when an automated voice tells me “Sorry, but all the operators are currently taking calls and are very busy, please call back later” *beep beep beep*.

I WAS HUNG UP ON!
I couldn’t believe it, I wasn’t placed in a queue the phone just disconnected. WTF?

Is it really too much to ask to speak to a human being these days or are people too fearful of getting flamed by an upset customer to answer a phone personally?