Let sellers beware of customers’ boycott

Why are big companies so difficult to reach by phone? Take the power utilities, telcos and Internet and cable service providers. When customers need to get in touch with them, all they get is a prerecorded prompter that runs on and on. More often than not, after long precious time have been frittered away waiting for a live operator to pick up the phone, rarely does one ever. Then the same prompter tells callers to just stay on the line (and bear the aggravation of listening to an endless barrage of advertising jingles), or it hangs up.

Such protocols are being adopted, we are told, because of the sheer volume of calls coming in. Their so-called customer-service hot-line just could not cope with that kind of traffic. Thus, most of them have become more brazenly creative: They snooker many calls by setting up a labyrinth of prerecorded options that bring the callers nowhere near the persons they want to talk to. Perhaps anticipating more complaints than anything else, they have them rerouted to dead-end destinations! The clear intention is to wear them out and make them go away.

Outsourcing is another such scheme. All the call center agents do is to take note of the problem with a promise to refer the same to management. After the customers hang up, it is almost a sure bet the problem will remain long enough for them to get agitated again into making another call—this time angrier and nastier. And the vicious cycle begins again.

Let’s bottom-line it: Those companies should be deliriously ecstatic they have so many customers knocking on their doors. The least they can do to show appreciation toward the patronage (for making them richer) is to hire more staff to handle a really booming business! They should dread the day when their phones stop ringing!

The same can be said of many big banks, the multinationals being the most callous. This actually happened to me and I am quite sure has been replicated many times over elsewhere. Sometime last year, out of the blue, a multinational bank sent me an unsolicited, pre-approved credit card. Since I never used it anyway, I just ignored the initial billings. Then as the bills piled up, I began to feel annoyed already. I tried calling to ask the bank to stop sending me the bills for “membership fees,” plus all kinds of penalties/surcharges for “late payment” (totaling by that time about P20,000!). After weeks of trying, I finally gave up. Needless to say, the bills kept coming. The bank even had the temerity to bring the matter to a lawyer—a shyster, no doubt, by the tenor of his threat to file a civil or “criminal case which can put you in jail for a minimum of one year”! I dared him to “be my guest”!

Bigness does not give banks the right to harass customers! It should no longer be “caveat emptor”—let the buyer beware (of poor quality or sloppy service), but “caveat vendor”—let the seller beware (of boycotts)! It is time to show big business we are no schlemiels they can run circles around.

—STEPHEN L. MONSANTO,

Monsanto Law Office,

Loyola Heights, Quezon City