Don’t let your anger persist
If you accept abuse with a smile, then you&#x27;re just going to keep on receiving abuse. The reason companies get away with providing this kind of appalling customer service is because too many people put up with it out of politeness.<p>By the time I&#x27;ve been treated like this by a company, I&#x27;ve already made up my mind to stop using their service ASAP. When I finally get through to an operator, my aims are:<p>1. Get a fix to my immediate problem.<p>2. Waste as much of the company&#x27;s time, money and goodwill as possible. They&#x27;ve wasted my time by putting me on hold, but every minute I spend arguing with an operator or, better yet, a supervisor, is time the company is <i>paying</i> someone for, and has an opportunity cost, because they&#x27;re not speaking to some other customer.<p>3. Piss–off the operator enough that they&#x27;ll consider quitting their job. I do feel sympathy for people who work in these call centres, but only the same way I&#x27;d feel sympathy for the soldier of an evil regime. It doesn&#x27;t stop me viewing them as the enemy.<p>Right now there is a metastasised corporate approach to running customer service that has focussed on cutting costs and outsourcing to the point that the actual service provided is totally dysfunctional. The result is that if you have <i>any</i> problem, with <i>any</i> large company, it is a crapshoot whether you will ever get it fixed. This situation is a <i>deliberate</i> choice on the part of the companies involved.<p>This won&#x27;t change by people being calm and friendly and swallowing their anger, any more than politics ever gets fixed by people voting for the marginally less corrupt&#x2F;incompetent candidate every four years. And anyone who tells you it will is either naive or dishonest.<p>This situation will only change through a revolution in consumer behaviour that makes it too difficult and&#x2F;or expensive for the companies to continue as is. Companies that think it&#x27;s OK to treat their customers like garbage need to be met with concentrated and directed anger at every opportunity. Giving their customer services employees such hell that they can&#x27;t retain them is just the start of it.<p>When it becomes impossible for companies to act like this without unleashing a tsunami of fury from every direction, you can bet they&#x27;ll change their approach pretty quickly.