SLUDGE

This one will resonate with all of you.

Think about a time when you were on hold with a company and some LOUD music was playing in a loop. Every 15-30 seconds a voice comes on saying something like “Thank you for your patience. Your call is important to us.” Maybe you get the good old “We are currently experiencing higher than normal call volume and your call will be answered in the order that it was received.”

My personal favorite is the dreaded voice telling to listen closely (how else would I listen? far?) because our menu options have recently changed. I call bullshit. Define recently….but then I hear:

Press 1 to file a claim

Press 2 to become a member

Press 3 if you are a member

Press 4 if your member has fallen off

Press 5 if you would like surgery to repair a member

Press 6 for a member of your family

Press 7 to re-member

Press 8 if you are a non-member

Press 9 to repeat this menu

All other callers, please press 0, or stay on the line. Say “Member” for a representative.

Does any of this sound familiar? Of course it does, but no one talks about this at parties because it is boring and all of us go through it 95% of the time that we call any business. So many companies boast about customer service but I have been doing a little research after my sister sent me an article about things such as filing a customer complaint, trying to obtain a refund, or simply calling a company to do business. It’s a mess and it’s a mess on purpose. The practice of companies hoping that we will simply become frustrated and go away even has a name: SLUDGE.

Did you know that since the 1970’s there has been a thing called the “National Customer Rage Survey?” Me neither but it’s awesome. I think the survey size is too small and I don’t like to spit our mad data on dis blog, so I be spittin’ mad game about said data instead. Word.

I’ll sum it up for you. People are full of rage. It’s easy to buy everything….but return something larger than a retail store purchase? Not so much. When there’s waiting time, paperwork, or confusing phone voicemail prompts this is sludge. There is a book about this and that’s where I am stealing some of my intel here. At first I thought it was “ha-ha” funny until I learned that it is done on purpose. To make us go away. To make us so mad and frustrated that we will give up and then go bitch about it on social media where people increasingly only listen to themselves or join the bitch train or bitch about what other people are bitching about.

Our lives depend on the capacity to navigate something and when we can’t do it, we are lost and we feel that we have treated with no dignity by the people doing the sludging. I made that word up.

So here’s what companies do: they make it tough to “unsubscribe”, they give you the phone menu like I mention above, they put terms that you just signed in 3 point font that takes 5 pages. No one reads it, but we all sign it.

CEO’s value shareholder who value price increases. Increasingly, customer service doesn’t matter so much anymore because we all put up with the bullshit AND we keep using the same companies. Next time you are in Target, listen for shopper INSIDE Target complaining about things and prices INSIDE Target. I’ll bet that you’ve had bad coffee from Dunks or Starbucks but you shake it off and still go back. Fly on American Airlines and they do something to screw up your day? Hey, here’s a $300 voucher for a future flight (with blackout days and times that you are not likely to use) and we all take the voucher thinking we just got a deal from the airline.

Why do you think so many companies offer coupons and mail-in rebates? Verizon cell phone used to be notorious for this back in the day. Save this receipt, fill out a form and mail it in for $50 off your bill or something like that. I read that about 8% of people actually took the time to do it. How about getting a refund check in the amount of $2.45? How many people will actually deposit that? The company could refund a million dollars like that, show that they gave that out, but if only $10,000 of that actually sees a bank, who wins? SLUDGE.

We have abusive relationships with all of these companies but we don’t leave. It’s easier for you to eat the crappy breakfast sandwich because it’s convenient and it’s part of your day and you will likely get a better one tomorrow. See what you just did? You take the sludge. We all take the sludge. I pride myself on not going away whenever I fight with Anthem Health Insurance, but I gotta say that 2 appeals, the start of an external review, and the N.H. insurance commission getting involved was quite enough to wear me down. The policy to NOT pay for my med flight when I was sick was a bloated 12 page document listing all of the ways that you could be denied. My favorite paragraph said that if there was a car accident or something and med flight was called BUT the patient died before the chopper could get there OR to the hospital, then Anthem would not have to pay. SLUDGE at the lowest and highest level.

So here it is: all of this stuff makes you not only feel that your time is not valuable, but that YOU are not valuable. You are a number, a statistic, a speck of nothing. You don’t not matter. It’s annoying if you are trying to navigate some B.S. with the I.R.S. but it’s a whole other level if you or someone that you love is fighting for a service that their life depends on. Imagine calling 911 and getting an AI menu? How about if you have a disabled child and can’t ever speak to “supervisors” at the health insurance company or “hospital administrators” because “they don’t speak with patients??” I’ve been told that.

I once asked the insurance call center gentlemen if the call was indeed being recorded as the automated voice told me so. Apparently that wasn’t on his script because he paused and said “yes, why?”

“I would like to have it on the record that you just stated that there is no way that you can help me resolve this claim any further. I want it on the record that the company that I pay more than $25,000 a year AND co-pays, AND medical equipment charges AND specialist higher co-pays will not cover a bill that I have already paid for through purchasing insurance coverage in the first place. I would like you to say yes to all of that in case we ever need to listen to a recording of this call in a court of law. If you will not repeat that you cannot help me, please give me your call supervisor so we can set the record straight sir. Thank you.”

There was a pause as a response for that certainly was not in his script. He simply said yes, that is correct. Please file the appropriate appeals paperwork that can be found on our website. Click.

I never raised my voice.

In researching call centers I came across an interview with a woman named Rebecca Harris, who has worked the industry for almost 20 years, mainly with internet, T.V. and phone companies. I’m stealing a part of her interview from an article in The Atlantic written by Chris Colin.

“I’d want to do everything I can to help the person on the other end,” she told Colin. “But I had to pretend that I can’t, because they don’t want me to escalate the call.”

Many customers called because they were feeling pinched by their bill. For a lot of them, a rebate was available. But between the callers and that rebate, the company had installed an expanse of sludge.

“They would outright tell you in training you’re not allowed to give them a rebate offer unless they ask you about it with specific words,” she said. “If they say they’re paying too much money, you couldn’t mention the rebate. Or if the customer was asking about a higher rebate but you knew there was a lower one, they trained us to redirect them to that one.”

Harris told The Atlantic that she’d think about her parents in times like this, and would treat her callers the way she’d want them treated. That didn’t go over well with her managers. “They’d call me in constantly to retrain me,” she said. “I wasn’t meeting the numbers they were asking me to meet, so they weren’t meeting their numbers.”

Supervisors didn’t tell Harris to deceive or thwart customers. But having them get frustrated and give up was the best way to meet those numbers.

Sometimes she’d intentionally drop a call or feign technical trouble: “‘I’m sorry, the call … I can’t … I’m having a hard time hearing y—.’ It was sad. Or sometimes we’d drag out the call enough that they’d get agitated, or say things that got them agitated, and they’d hang up.”

Lovely huh?

As I read on, I found something that may make you feel better. Before you read the next part, just know that I am down for this if anyone wants to hang. It’s called “Admin Night.”

“Admin Night” isn’t a party. It isn’t taking-care-of-business. It’s both! At some appointed hour, friends come over with beverages and a folder of disputed charges, expiring miles, and other sludge. A few minutes of chitchat, half an hour of quiet admin, begin again.

Who’s all in? When the sludge comes in, we gonna’ kick it in the chin!

Stay safe, stay awesome, and stay tuned.