This is my little piece of the world. I'm a relentless tech junkie and prepress guy ...these are my ramblings and useless swill.

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Is It Just Me?



For those of you who are in the prepress industry, dealing with customers and their myriad of issues is a daily if not hourly occasion. I get phone call after phone call and email after email from CSR's asking for kindergarten level prepress information. Do they soak in anything from day to day operations or does it all just bounce off? Is it just me?

I love it when a 25 year Customer Service Representative veteran calls me asking "The customer sent in files all set up as RGB, what should I do?" Or here's a classic... without any prior knowledge or information regarding a situation, a CSR will pull this one "Tom, I have a customer on the line who is unhappy with something we did to their files, can I connect them, click..." And there I am, knee deep in a customer situation I have no information on, lovely! 

Or the another ditty, "Sparky, (my nickname at work) I have a customer who sent all their files with type less then a quarter inch from trim, what do I tell them?"

Seriously?!? 

I don't make enough money to do your job and mine at the same time. Do you ever get this? "Tom please call this customer and help them solve this issue?" I hate that with a passion. How can a CSR learn anything if they pawn everything off on the tech staff? I always insist that the CSR set up and listen in on the conference call..with high hopes they will learn something...rarely happens that way!!

I also love, love, LOVE IT when CSR's send strings of emails back and forth to their customer, wasting time and energy, instead of just picking up the phone and making a simple phone call. Where has the service gone in the customer service rep?

Does it seem like we have more customer expositors then customer service people around? I can pay someone $7.50 an hour to open FedEx boxes and shuffle work around. That's easy. What we need are people who can make decisions and work by themselves. I need good people to block and get things done, not forward emails and put customers on hold so they can ask someone else's opinion on the matter.

It is just me?

1 comment:

  1. I just had a customer service rep transfer a call to me yesterday...that's not even my gig anymore and its a call we have talked about more than once. Is he just checking his brain at the door or what?

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