The Last Word: Call me anytime

OPINION: Here at Rabid Reseller we’re always looking at ways to improve our customer service, so it should be no surprise to discover that we’ve now got our very own call centre to handle our punters’ problems.

Of course we always try to keep our costs as low as possible and the call centre outsourcing contract went to the lowest bidder. Actually, they were the lowest by quite a large margin. And when we say large we really mean humungous. And by that we actually mean almost free. In fact if it wasn’t for the GST they’d be paying us money to use the service.

Now it’s common knowledge that call centre operators like to base their operations in Third World countries where everyone is happy to get Third World wages, so we naturally assumed that our provider had found yet another Third World English-speaking subsistence-wage country with rock-solid industrial relations reforms cemented into their constitutional dictatorship.

However, we were assured that our call centre was actually based in the good old US of A where they do speak a recognisable form of English, but last time we checked they still get paid for answering the phone.

An article in the news alerted us to a possible explanation. Some call centre operators in the US have been “hiring” prison inmates to handle the calls, while others have chosen to engage Native Americans. We decided we’d better find out exactly who was handling our calls, so we dialled our support number. “Wassup mo’ fo,” said the voice on the other end of the line. That answers that question then. But would this prison bitch be able to help our customers? “Hello, I bought a PC from Rabid Reseller and it doesn’t work,” we told the tough guy. “Say what? That ain’t right. You tell that there store to give y’all back yo’ money and if ’n they don’ then you tell ‘em I’ll be ‘round directly to apply some cor-rective ther-urpy. We done learned all about cor-rective ther-urpy here in solitary, an’ I don’ think they’s gonna like it.”

Good grief. We’re going to have to make some changes to the contract. We can’t have the call centre offering refunds -- that’s completely contrary to Rabid Reseller policy.

Talking about money with customers after they’ve already handed it over will see these dudes spending more time in the slammer if anybody bothers to read the service survey we completed and the fine print in our call centre contract.

We’ve had a word with the warden who insists on being addressed as “the gay dungeon master” for reasons we still can’t quite grasp, and he said he’d had a word with the call centre manager, Chief Answers-Two-Phones-At-Once.

They both assured us that it wouldn’t happen again, and that the recalcitrant operator had indeed been sent for some more cor-rective ther-urpy in solitary confinement. As a matter of fact he’s been there for six weeks now, muttering something about being better off there instead of having to answer Rabid customer phone calls. Just what we need -- ingrate inmates taking sides with our procrastinating punters.

Some new technology got us all excited this week. Yes we’re taking about the iPod nana, although we don’t understand why they named it after our Italian grandmother. But what’s really exciting is how small the thing is and that works on two levels.

Punters just love tiny toys, although they seem to prefer huge SUVs with enormous V8 motors to take their stuff home from the store. On the next level this iPod is seriously easy to lose so we regularly sell punters another one after the first one falls out of their pocket as they climb into their SUVs.

But customers have taken issue with the brochures that claim you can keep 25,000 photos on your iPod nana. We just point out the fine print at the bottom that clearly states that “photo capacity is based on iPod nana-viewable photos transferred from iToons”.

Now just how hard is it to understand that? Obviously you can’t keep large numbers of photos of any old subject, just a truckload of snapshots of granny’s cartoon favourites.

It’s all there in the name.

Gotta go, customers waiting!

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