The Frustrations of calling Customer Service

I have a pre-paid Tracfone cell phone. I like these because they do not require you to sign a contract and pay a monthly fee. I can call long distance and internationally for the cost of a local phone call, which is mighty handy when one is trying to save money. The one I have at the moment, the LG600G, pictured left, has some quite nifty features compared to my first cell phone, which was a bare bones model that did the job but often had a hard time receiving signals in remote areas, something I have not experienced with my newer model. I've never had to pay roaming charges with this new one, something I sincerely appreciate. And it's got some nice organizational tools that allow me to store a lot of vital information that I need at my fingertips on its notepad feature. The contact list allows me to include e-mails and snail mail addresses for friends and family so it almost mimics a full blown address book, very handy indeed when I cannot remember such things. It also has a browser feature, which up until recently was pretty handy. Admittedly, it was a sort of "mini-browser" that didn't really allow you to surf the Internet, but you could get news, weather and sports information which is handy to have at your fingertips as well. However, recently, Tracfone now seems to allow you surf the Internet with a full browser on your phone. Fine, but the problem with this is in being able to get weather radar and satellite pictures because they won't come up. I called Tracfone's customer service number today to find out if there's a solution to the problem. The first woman I got was extremely hard to understand due to her heavy accent and she kept saying that she could not hear me despite the fact that I was using my land line phone which is digital and a far better connection than I used to have. I had to speak very slowly to make myself understood to her because I assume that she could hear me fine but could not understand me. No matter how slowly and carefully I tried to explain the problem, she didn't seem to get what I was trying to tell her. She put me on hold a few times to get her supervisor who I never spoke to, and eventually she seemed to give up in frustration to connect me to someone else who also had a foreign accent, but not nearly as heavy as hers. I few times, in fact, I misunderstood this poor gal because she was trying at one point to give me a "ticket number" which sounded very much to my ears like "picture number".

So I got connected to this other fellow who had to put me on hold a few times as well. Needless to say, I began feeling rather exasperated that I wasn't getting my point across very well or being understood very clearly. I completely understand that these folks are just trying to make a living the same as the rest of us, but for the life of me, I cannot understand why companies have off-shored their customer service call centers to foreign countries where the workers are hard pressed to be understood by the average American just trying to get answers as to why this thing or that thing isn't working properly. Anymore, when I call a customer service number, I don't know if I am calling Mumbai, Caracas or some other far flung place. I never get someone American. I always get some heavily accented foreigner that I am hard pressed to understand and have to ask again and again to repeat themselves. This creates frustration on both ends, the customer and the phone rep. Doesn't seem a good business model to me, to say the least!

Well, what I ultimately ended up being told was that any Internet graphics are going to be too big for the phone to display, so I can't get anything at all but text information. What the hell good is it having an Internet browser if you can't get images? When I am traveling, having the latest radar and satellite weather information is vital to me to know what to expect. Now that I can't get that (but I can get weather forecasts, which aren't always accurate!), I don't know whether Tracfone eventually plans to fix that problem or whether I will have to get a phone that can actually access graphics or what. It's just all so frustrating. Spending what seemed like forever on the phone with people I could hardly understand and who seemed to be having the same problem with me only to be told that I can't use any of the Internet graphics seemed like the ultimate experience in sheer frustration. Is it any wonder that this country is in an ugly mood of late?