Customer Service

I work at Sears. Their promise and commitment is to serve the customer first, last, and for life. This is why they have embarked on a program of money-saving well known in the business world as making life more difficult.

Examples of this include the following: promising to say "Yes" without ever intending to, employing half-deaf computer phone operators, and centralizing customer service operations. I have no problem with outsourcing to India, although that's another savings method. There are enough stupid people in America to deal with to make the Hinglish language barrier pale in comparison. I offer by way of example my work day, which--as recession cuts back on sales--seems more and more focused on customer service--or, rather, on dealing with customer service for the customer so they can be hounded by the same excellent service later on (48 to 72 hours processing time, approximately).

It used to be that a mattress exchange was effected by the store's sending out an inspector upon being called by a complaining customer; if they weren't bullshitting, we'd order them a brand new item. Simple enough. I'm now instructed to tell my customers we, the company, have centralized our customer service system to provide simple, fast, and more effective service, rather than dealing with them ourselves.

This is a lie, which as we all know is the cornerstone of the modern American business model. Theoretically, the company saves money by having an employee like myself call the exchange office to give them all the information they need to think about calling the customer for three days, and then ask them about a dozen questions to find out whether they do, in fact, deserve a new mattress, or boxspring, or what have you, or at least can convincingly answer questions about how they sleep at night. Usually this only takes me a few minutes of waiting on hold, followed by twenty to forty minutes of painstaking explanation to somebody in order to have them email a request to have somebody else look up the information and call the customer. Add an extra middleman, save three hundred dollars, I suppose.

So I call them up, give the operator the customer's information, and after listening to Operator # 1's finely tuned sarcasm ("her boxspring is tearing? she must've been pretty rough with that thing") find out an interesting fact: the transaction I did myself three months ago never ended up in their computers. So . . . somebody dropped the ball. Fair enough. I can give the operator the information, right? Not quite. She tells me, reassuringly, that I can simply fax the information to another department, the Other Team, and they'll handle everything.

I thank Operator # 1 and hang up, tell my manager, and attempt to fax the receipt to the Other Team using the number I'm given. My store's fax machine is broken and hasn't been repaired in two months, but that's okay because there's another fax machine hiding out in one of the booths Sears rents out to other businesses. Easy as pie, except in a Three Stooges cream pie sort of way, as I'm rewarded by "The number you have reached is no longer in service; please hang up and try again" tinning out of the fax machine speaker. Second try, same result.

I go back to my post and call the Exchange People again, and connect to Operator # 2, who tells me I must've been given the wrong number. She doesn't do this right away, of course. By default she asks me for the customer's information, and won't go on until I give it to her. Then she says, "I'm sorry. We don't have any record of that purchase ever having been made." I tell her I'm fully aware of this and am trying to fax the information, except I think I may have been given the wrong number.

I ask her to check it, and she confirms with her manager that Other Team's fax system is, in fact, inoperational at the moment. She's very calming, though. She tells me they'll call the customer in a couple days and straighten everything out.

I ask her, "If her purchase information doesn't exist anywhere in your guys' computers, will they still call her?"

"Oh. Um . . . no," she says. "They won't."

"Well, that's kind of a Catch-22, isn't it?" I'm excited to be able to use this phrase until I realize it's true. "I can't send them the information, and they won't act on information they don't have. Could you guys maybe call me back when the fax machines are up and running again?" She promises to do this, after balking at the fact that she'll have to deal with a computer operator in order to get in touch with me. Or somebody will.


So I wait, try to do business, dust vacuum cleaners, and wish for customers. My boss comes in to work just in time for the customer to call back angry about not having been contacted yet. This is where the best part occurs, because my boss at that point asks me to start over with the Exchange People in order to be able to call the customer back and tell her we're trying.

I end up with Operator # 3, who is possibly one of the most exciting people I've ever had the privilege to speak to. Following the same default procedure, she refuses to talk to me until
I give her the customer's information. Internal sighing and external compliance on my part ensues, at which point she offers me a revelation: The transaction I'm asking her to help me with never happened. Not, the records might've gotten misplaced; not, I can't find it; no, it never happened. I offer to give her the receipt number, but she tells me that's unnecessary: the purchase never occurred.

I tell her, "I've been working on this issue for the last hour and already spoke to two operators at your call center already about it. I was told the ball was probably dropped somewhere, which occasionally occurs, and I'm trying to make sure the customer is taken care of anyway. I tried to fax the information, but someone's fax system is offline, so I'm wondering if I can maybe give you the information to enter into your system."

"No," she replies. I can't do that." But faced with the paradox I've just presented her, she adds, "If the purchase really did happen, it must have been a local delivery from your store, which means you need to talk to the Other Team."

I balk here. "Ma'am, what's your name? Aurelia*? Aurelia, our store never delivers mattresses from store stock because there never is a store stock of mattresses. Mattresses are made from scratch and delivered by the nationwide corporate delivery service from a distribution center to the customer."

Nobody in our store ever even touches a mattress, which leads me to a question: "If you're right in telling me your department is not responsible for the problem, and what you're telling me about the Other Team means they wouldn't handle it, is there a third party I should be talking to?"

No, she tells me, but she'd be willing to transfer me to the Other Team anyway so they could transfer me back to her. "No! Please don't do that!" I say. "Is there anybody you can ask about entering the transaction information if you're really the ones who would handle this sort of problem?"

"We are the ones who handle this sort of problem," Operator # 3 / Aurelia tells me. "But there's no information about the transaction in my system, so it must never have happened."

"But it did happen! I happened it! I sold this customer that mattress!" I'm not quite this emphatic over the phone, but this is the gist of what I tell her.

"I'm sorry. There's nothing I can do. I can transfer you to the Other Team if you like," she tells me.

"Is there anybody you can ask about--"

"I can't tell you anything about anything," she says firmly. "The purchase never happened. My computer says so. If it did happen, you're going to have to talk to your manager about telling us that it did."

"But--"

"You can talk to your manager, unless you want me to transfer you to the Other Team."

"Do they handle this sort of thing?" I ask, by way of reminder that I do not, in fact, want to be transferred to the Other Team.

"No they don't. You're going to have to ask your manager if you really sold the mattress you say you sold, since I can't believe anything really happened that isn't entered into my computer. That's all I can tell you right now. If you don't want me to transfer you to the Other Team, there's nothing else I can do for you."

A bleak "okay" is all I can get out.

"Thank you for being a part of the Sears team! Have a nice day."

And she hangs up.

To make a long story only slightly longer, I told my boss what happened. No paraphrase, she told me that was "retarded," and said she'd talk to them. I went to lunch. Thankfully, she's an angrier, louder person than I am, and four phone conversations and five and a half hours later, she was able to call the customer back and tell her that someone would be calling her to ask her some questions about whether she deserved a replacement in the next few days.

"Sears," says the motto, "Is dedicated to providing our customers with a superior level of service."

I believe them.


* Names have been changed to protect the innocent, by which I mean myself, from legal complaint.