Harish Palaniappan's

You should be storing or remembering atleast 5 important phone numbers. And these will be customer care numbers of your bank, or broadband service provider, or mobile service provider and the likes.

Why? Because you need to contact them on issues with their services. If you are a regular internet user and that too from India you would definitely have called the broadband provider this week.

Are these numbers helpful?
Firstly,
Its good these days every company really spends money on customer care by hiring a call center and they are reachable 24-by-7 for solving issues, or atleast that consoling message 'Your complaint has been noted".

Secondly,
More than anything else this helps the middle and top level management of services companies to happily escape facing the customer... since all customer complaints are routed through the call center to the support personnel.

The big advantage:
Like said earlier, your call is handled 24-by-7 and your issue processed (atleast forwarded by the system to the right guys). This is a huge advantage which should be likened. And this advantage is very meaningful in populated countries meaning more people could complain, and also wherever the attitude of managers or the companies itself not being customer friendly.

About the attitude part.. Its bare truth that you would come across only a few managers in big offices, who really bother if a customer has a complaint, because the general opinion is 'if you have customers you will have complaints...don't be glued to them.'. And so, raising a complaint with a call center helps you feel better that somebody atleast makes a note and gives you a complaint number.. and still further, they sometimes call you up as part of a feedback process to find out whether you are happy with the way it was fixed.

About the protectionism... yes, this needs no proving that managers hide behind the firewall of call centers.. and its so hard to get a manager to answer your complaint on the phone. I would only believe that Call centers might have very clear instructions that calls are not to be redirected to managers unless its a big customer.

Though advantageous to many occassions, a customer care center has so many protectionisms implemented that you can't ignore 'that big fact' that managers are hiding behind.

The term used in software is Firewall for equipment protecting computers from the internet, the general public and importantly from hackers. The term is very applicable here .. We could term Customer care as a corporate firewall to protect middle and higher level management from facing the heat of problems in the services that they mismanage.

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