Christmas are coming, and traditionally that means good time of the year to push people to buy things they don’t need.

in Poland, companies generally don’t care what Customer wants. and don’t listed in the process of ignoring him/her.

why are companies selling services choose not to listen? they don’t care? i was talking about this paradox during Cisco Connect, but in reality i was just repeating what everyone sane enough to think shouts left and right - we want customized offer, not something off the shelf. true value that people appreciate and will be loyal is created by listening to what customer wants - and giving to her/him what they really need (it’s actually pretty complex, but that’s basic intro to subject).

thanks to time of year (or maybe revenge about what i said on stage of Cisco Connect, i had negative pleasure of receiving two separate telephone calls. i’m not answering unknown or restricted connections, but recently all of those companies got clever in wrong way.

and just to makes things crystal clear - i don’t have a problem with the actual people making the calls. i’m ranting about companies that forced them to do so.

first call came from my service provider call center. nice lady finally got through after 6pm and instead asking me what i want, she immediately jumped to conclusion that my internet access needs upgrade. well… ok, what does that exactly mean? it turned out, that with the new, special offer i’ll get ’new, better router’ and ‘stable internet’. oh, that’s great. fortunately my ISP does allow using your own router, as current portfolio of my ISP looks like this:

Router portfolio from my ISP

can’t say i’d be happy with that selection. i have three internet uplinks (+cellular backup), and BGP running over one of them. none of offered routers can support this. and well, my home router is:

Cisco 2921

anyway, i decided to skip that and got interested about this ‘stable internet’ - so, should i understand that up until now it wasn’t stable? well, i asked nice lady does she understand that i have two services/lines from them and what actually “stable” means? she wasn’t interested unfortunately, as she was tasked only to deal with “link number one” (whichever it was - she couldn’t tell or care). the only way to break this circle was to thank her and disconnect.

annoying, isn’t it?

second phone came from my bank, on saturday morning. actually, my bank connected with other bank and they simply went berserk on redesigning web portal for their basic service. well, bravo… i have “personal manager” in that bank (greetings!). i can’t however get used to having him, being used to the fact that you should bow your head before bank and don’t discuss anything, and accept everything. one of the perks of having “personal manager” was the fact that he knew me and understood where and how i work, and where it’s best to reach out to me (and with what specifically).

unfortunately, after merge, something bad happened. the guy that was on the phone that morning didn’t care about anything i wanted to say (just like the lady from ISP), he was more interested in informing me, that the chat will be recorded (well, i could have been recording it as well, who cares?). then he launched into ‘christmas are coming and you have more needs right now!’. sure, i do have them. but quick look at my account and its history should tell you, mr. call center guy, that pre-defined script won’t work here. i’m not really interested in borrowing 4000 PLNs in cash, and history of my christmas shopping, year by year shows what i am aiming for and spending money on. they have full info on my finances and should be better in analyzing it than me! but no, unfortunately. my “bigger needs” apparently meant some predefined cash credit and increasing my credit card limit. well… at least he didn’t need to be informed three times it’s end of conversation. or any conversation overall.

in both of the cases it was just a minimal work to give me really customized service, and money would change owners faster than those people could recite “we’re recording this session to increase quality and security”.

but why? if apparently, it’s easier to not to listen?