The Dread Baby Roberts

Dibs.

(Prince, Mai-Tai, Baby, Porsche, BJ, Boss, James Bond, Mickey Mouse, VIP etc etc)

And now Halsey seems like a wonderful name.

Who stole my motivation?

And yet, I'm fairly sure that'll be a the surname of a male explorer and not the first name of a baby girl.

Yeah, well, we named our son the surname of a male explorer and yet everyone else with the name is a girl (including, unfortunately, a character in an upcoming kids movie).

Prince, Mai-Tai, Baby, Porsche, BJ, Boss, James Bond, Mickey Mouse, VIP

OK, I know Lexus is a popular baby name in the States, and obviously if you drive a Hummer you name your kid BJ.

But please tell me the rest of those are exaggeration.

Speaking of Mickey Mouse... A ticket came through the helpdesk the other day.

The woman calling in gave me the ticket number.

Me: "Lets see here...Mickey?"

Her: "No, Nikki."

Me: "Sorry, let me fix that. Weird typo."

Her: "That's OK, I get it a lot. I go to a restaurant and get called Mickey."

Me: "At least they don't call you 'Jessica.'"

Her: (Laughs.) "True. "

Obviously watches Heroes.

Cool - Haunted Mansion bash (for those of you in SoCal, and those who might go for a party at the HM.

I'm torn...

I went and looked up the Wired bit on customer service that Raq mentioned last night. It's under the grouping "Why Things Suck". Which, natch, set my hackles arisin'.

But the article was more about, as it said, WHY things suck, not about "Let's complain about poor customer service like whiny entitled lunkheads" which is what I was expecting.

And they did at least mention that, while only 1 in 3 call centers bother to measure customer satisfaction, at the same time 1 in 2 don't bother with employee satisfaction.

(In my experience the number of customer service areas that paid anything but lip service to employee satisfaction was 0 in ALL.)

And the bit that Raq quoted about how the ideal CS rep is "uncreative, has low incentive, and demonstrates limited empathy" is according to some unnamed personality inventory tests.

Which gets me to wondering...why is that the "ideal" CS rep? You want a lifeless, disaffected drone on your line dealing with the customers?

And as soon as I asked the question, the answer popped into my noggin: Yes, of course they do.

At some high-up level of any company Customer Service isn't about actually servicing customers. It's about saying they service customers without actually having to spend more money than necessary on it.

A surly, disaffected, unempathic shithead snarling over the phone gets you off the line faster. The faster you get off the line, the faster the next pissed off rip-off victim can get on the line to get shuffled on their way. The more of these call turnovers a center gets, the higher the numbers that they can publish in a quarterly stockholders' statement or some business rag and say "Look at these numbers! They're huge! We have awesome customer service!" And that increases shareholder satisfaction and company value, which generates more money.

None of which makes it down to the customer service department, by the by.

So there are three major factors that lead to an ever increasing level of overall dissatisfaction with Customer Service on all levels. These are, in no particular order of importance:

1) The customers. As I have stated a quajillion times, you are not always right, you are wrong and don't you take that tone with me. The more asschapeau customers a rep gets, the less incentive they have to be nice or helpful. Customers: Be nice and we'll be nice back.

2) The reps. Specifically, the morale of said reps. Usually we are not paid well, have crappy benefits and our job is, quite literally, to get yelled at for eight hours a day. That sucks in ways beyond description. If companies would treat the reps with respects, reward them well and give them a reason to be nice and helpful...well, they probably would be.

3) The companies. As demonstrated above, they really don't give a fuck about customer service. It's a shiny bauble to make them look prettier, but they'll happily pay the lower price for paste jewelry rather than invest in an actual goddamned diamond. They don't care about the customers and they don't want to deal with them in any way...this became obvious when I was working those three whole days at the vehicle refrigerator/crapper company, it was subtly obscured but still evident at the variable annuity company and even at the small lighting company we would be *really put out* if we had to talk to an actual end-user since normally we dealt with the dealers and wholesalers almost exclusively. The heavily implied message is: We already got your money. Now, fuck off.

I know this is probably not news to youse guys, but this "revelation" puts my thoughts about corporate culpability in the Decline of Customer Service into a clearer light. I appreciate you giving me the space to vent mine spleen in random rambling conjecture.

And to answer your next question: No, I am not drunk.

Yet.

No, no, those are kids' names. Also Mami, Canberra, Chin, Arm, Everest...but you have to remember that the majority of these parents and kids don't speak English as their first language, and most of the Thai kids have a 'proper', many-syllabled first name, but will be generally known by either a monosyllabic Thai nickname (translating as, to take examples from among my Thai acquaintance, Prawn, One, Apple, Fatty...) or else something that sounds cool because it's in a foreign language, ie English.

sighs.

'Course, Everest's mum is American, and she's a teacher. And she's lovely, and I confess that if I ever had kids they'd likely get called things like India or Serendipity or Shazam...but I do think that any name that can be made easily into a joke is unfortunate. I mean, mount is also a verb, for goodness sakes.

...still, that's probably just my reaction, having read too much slash.

I love my Thai students' monosyllabic nicknames as much as I love their full Thai names -- especially since they have apparently fuckall to do with the full name, in marked contrast to the Western pattern of nicknames usually being some kind of shortening (or at least reference to) the full thing.

Whenever we speak of names I feel it is necessary to mention that I will never forgive a friend of Perkins' and mine who had a wonderful, lyrical Chilean surname and yet traded it for her DH's when they married. His last name? Gross.

And we will not discuss what they named their son. Whitefont: Max!