@Keri – Sure, it’s not a glamorous job. But anyone with a good work ethic should care not matter WHAT their jobs are. You don’t have to like it or think of it as a career, but if you want to “move up” later you better be able to prove you’re a good worker.

Google has really crapped me over in recent months on a lot of things, especially since they automate a lot of that sort of stuff. Which really takes a lot of experiences out of the equation. No real reasoning, you know?

I’m never one to really take anything out on service reps. A lot of them have their lives pretty bad. (It’s easier to hit big companies where it hurts most; their wallet and reputation. Lashing out on reps is a waste of time.)

I don’t know what your credentials are, but you definitely talk an awesome talk. Like you actually care about the customers. Again, we need more people like that. ^_^

One of the tricks I use to keep myself calm is that if I have the time to resolve the issue, I’ll call back on another shift, giving myself time to cool down and have the opportunity to tap a new well of people. For Comcast I found that the people I’d get around lunch time for technical support weren’t especially helpful. I now mainly call the night shift for technical support. Once I had a 6 hour ordeal with Comcast over the phone and eventually crossed over to the next shift of people and they solved my problem in 10 minutes, something the other shift tried all day.

Another is make sure to leave a good report for the reps that are particularly helpful, I’ve found it goes a long way to help reward them or normalize that type of help. A lot of companies aren’t even set up for a compliment (one woman says “Should I fill out a complaint form with a positive note?”), but you can ask for their supervisor and rave about them a bit.

I’m pretty sure I would have gone off on them big time if they had kept me on the phone, only to tell me that customer service was down like J’s story. They should have told you that upfront and asked you to call back later. No excuses for letting it drag out so long.

The really horrible one first so you can go out of this feeling good after I finish. It was with Chase. I was going online to view my accounts and I realized that my savings account was no longer listed online. Low and behold to me, they had closed it due to having a zero balance for too long (nothing that they had ever told me would happen and nothing they notified me about before doing – I would have kept at least 5 dollars in there had I known they would do that – I tend to keep money in my checking account because I tend not to have a lot). Finding this out took forever though – no one could tell me why they did this and I kept getting bounced from department to department. I had to call them on at least three separate occasions (and one time was more than an hour) and then I finally found out why it was closed and got them to temporarily reopen it so I could put money in it. And even after all of that, they didn’t reopen it right (it was linked too a bunch of other accounts) and I am still dealing with that problem.

Also my school’s financial aid department – they lost a big amount of my loan money and kept telling me that they were taking care of it. The check was given to them in January – it wasn’t taken care of until I was out of the country after finals in May. They lost a check for a whole semester – and it is their job to handle money! It does not make me feel safe about it. And I just wish that they would have been honest with me because I could have gotten the bank to reissue it a lot sooner instead of being told it was being taken care of and then not being allowed to register for class.

As far as my good experience goes, it was surprisingly with Microsoft. I lost a bunch of really critical one note files to planning my wedding. I first e-mailed them and the guy was very nice, trying to help me troubleshoot and everything like that and when it didn’t work, he gave me a number to call. Because of school, I couldn’t call right away and my time to call was almost close to ending and he e-mailed me back and was like I see you haven’t called yet, what’s going on and I told him that I was really busy with school and he extended the window of time for me to call. Then when I did call, the guy was so nice – he spent 45 minutes on the phone with me figuring it out and helping me figure it out and in the end the files were found! It was completely my screw up and he could have just said you’re never getting them back that’s the way it works, but he took that time to walk me through finding and recovering them and I will be forever grateful.

I feel like this was as much a venting opportunity for you as it was a regular post:) Hey, we all need these!