What happens when you call the Customer Care line?
Bad, bad things. That’s what.
A while back I bought Panasonic digital cordless phones for my house. I don’t recommend them. They’re almost as quiet as the phones I bought them to replace, and they’ve got a pretty bad battery life on them, too.
One of the phones we’ve been having trouble with. The battery casing isn’t tight enough, allowing the battery pack to become loose, and then the bloody thing doesn’t charge properly. Because they’re still under warranty I found the customer service number and gave them a call to see about having the defective phone replaced or repaired.
I was treated like a moron over the phone. I’m extremely familiar with technology in many forms, as well as being tech support for other people, and I’ve never spoken to, nor been spoken to, in this fashion before in my life. The snotty little chavette on the phone asked me a few questions about my provider, >found out it wasn’t and was about to blame my provider for the issue as she’d never before heard of them. She was very confused when I said the phone lines go through my broadband modem, and insisted for a while that I was talking about mobile broadband in which case I wasn’t in the right area. I told her it wasn’t a problem with the lines and it wasn’t mobile broadband, so she asked a few other questions and then the really fantastic question of whether I’d plugged it in, and without even waiting for me to answer said she’d wait for me to try that and put me on hold for eight minutes. Wow. That’s appalling.
She got back on the phone and asked if it was working now. I was actually quite patient with her as my SO was sitting with me and laughing as each minute ticked by and I was still on hold, still listening to crappy hold music which fazed in and out. I told her that I’d had it plugged in, but the battery case was loose so the battery didn’t connect properly, leading it to randomly go flat and take a full 24 hours of recharging to work again, but that only worked when we took the battery case off and used an elastic band to hold the battery pack in place. She told me that that wasn’t using the phone in the correct manner and that this voided the warranty.
At this point I told her to put her manager on the phone. She asked why, so I told her I was going to talk to the manager about her level of incompetence and rudeness, at which point she because a very angry chavette and spluttered for a few seconds then hung up. I rang back and got a different consultant, who did put me through to the manager when I explained what had happened. I wonder what will happen to that girl…
It was hard not to just jump online and start looking for new business and office telephone systems, but the Panasonic people were alright in the end and are actually going to replace the phone in question, as apparently it’s a known fault with that particular model. So that’s nice.
