Lately I’ve been getting more and more fed up with customer service. I recently had to make several calls related to student loans and other financial matters (and don’t get me started on student loans!). I imagine it’s difficult enough to make these kinds of calls when you’re hearing, but when you’re deaf, there’s the added layer of navigating which systems are permitted by the corporations. While VP is useful in a lot of cases, some businesses are rather insistent you use one method or another.

For example, while calling Sallie Mae, I called repeatedly, trying to get through. When I finally reached a Live Person, I was told (in what the operator told me was an annoyed, irritated tone) that I needed to use their TTY number. Ok, fine. I’ll use the TTY. After dusting off the machine and setting the printer, I dialed the number I’d been given. Of course, if you’ve ever used a TTY, you know what happened next.

Nothing. No one on the other end bothered to pick up the phone. So I went from an automated system to Annoyed and Irritated to absolutely nothing. Ooookay… on to the next phone number.

The next creditor took an hour to reach, after repeatedly navigating the obstacle known as the Phone Menu. Generally considered one of the worst 20th century inventions known to man, the Phone Menu is a hassle for the average person. As we deaf know, though, it takes even more patience. Now with VP, it’s slightly easier, but there’s still the time lag between what the agent hears and what is relayed. For a system that is programmed to disconnect in the fastest amount of time possible, it can sometimes tax the patience of any human.

Ok, check. Going down the list, I continue to waste my entire day in customer service hell. Every company, business, or agency I tried calling gave me the runaround. Fortunately, my record isn’t quite so negative once I get through to a Real Live Person. Of course, it’s rather amusing trying to determine if the person I’m talking to is actually in the United States or not. Dell gets points for honesty: their representatives aren’t named “Molly” and “Dexter,” but instead identify themselves as Sanjay or Parvati.

The one surprising exception to the “we must not, under any circumstances, answer the TTY” rule is Chase. As some of you may remember, the NAD filed complaints with the DOJ against Chase Bank for refusing to take relay calls. I don’t know if it was a result of this action, but I got through on their TTY line with no problem, and the representative was the most helpful of all the phone reps I reached that day. Let’s hope this goodwill extends to relay calls sometime soon.

Customer service not only sucks when it comes to contacting companies through the phone. Lousy customer service extends to the products themselves. A prime example for me of late is Microsoft’s handling of Hotmail. I signed up for Hotmail way back when, at the dawn of the era of free online e-mail services. I was still in school at the time, but knew I’d like an address that would outlast my tenure as a student. It seemed like everyone around me either had a Hotmail account or was signing up for one. Being the lemming I am, I joined up too.

For a long time, I was satisfied. No, it wasn’t the best, and after Microsoft stepped in and bought Hotmail, there were times where the service, design, and format wasn’t as good as it had been. But for a long time, I had no major complaints. I checked out Yahoo!, and liked what I saw. Other services came and went, such as Lycos.

Recently, Google jumped in with Gmail, and I was intrigued enough to test it out and play around with it. But at this point, I’d been with Hotmail for ten years, and saw no reason to switch. Until this year, that is.

Recently, Microsoft (which was once a fairly decent company with some good products) did to Hotmail what they did to Word and WordPerfect: they completely botched it. They took something that worked decently the majority of the time and twisted it into a faint shadow of itself: “Windows Live Hotmail.” One of the most annoying changes was taking out the ability to cut and paste. Now doing so requires using such old-fashioned techniques as Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C, and Ctrl-V (which don’t work most of the time for me as it is…). Where previously I’d had the ability to adjust how many messages I wanted displayed on a page, now no option exists– my Inbox went from two pages to more than a dozen. The nicknames in the contacts list were thrown out, everyone is now alphabetized by their first name, and inserting alternate e-mail addresses was never fully explained.

Where once the “options” tab gave you a healthy number of choices, the current “Help” and “Options” sections are a Kafkaesque blur, and navigating back to the Inbox wasn’t as easy as it used to be. I could go on and on…

Suffice it to say I’m not thrilled with the current incarnation of Hotmail. I’m not the only one– most users who bother to comment have migrated to the pages of various Microsoft developers and left comments. See here, here, and here. There’s also this.

This example is just one of several I can think of, where companies manipulate or change their products in attempts to be up-to-date and to bring something “new” and “innovative” to the marketplace. My advice to the designers, ad executives, and project managers in Corporate America: heed the adage, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

My advice to the customer service reps? Remember that other adage, “The customer is always right.” Stop relying on phone menus, on outdated communications systems.

My advice to the corporate powers-that-be? Stop outsourcing jobs. Brush up on customer relations. Remember that an unsatisfactory experience is not positive PR.

Customer service in Corporate America will continue to suck until the managers and heads of all companies do a little homework. It wouldn’t hurt for each manager in every division to be required to work in customer service periodically, or to do blind testing of the representatives. Often, the public face of a company is one of the most important aspects in business, just as the final product is ultimately important.

But we consumers have a responsibility too, I think: any time we get a GOOD representative or salesperson, we should thank them. Writing a letter of positive feedback to the company wouldn’t hurt either. We can’t expect the best people to remain if we don’t say something. Many of us are used to complaining, but how many of us spend any time giving positive feedback?

Until things change though, I’ll be stuck on the phone for hours, and I’ll be window shopping for a new e-mail service. Any recommendations, folks?