Last week a message appears on my dashboard showing “Service engine soon”. I brought my car to the dealership to fix it. They replaced “ignition coil” and charged me ~ $230. I drive out from the dealership, 2 hours later the same message appears once again. This time I decided to get to the bottom of the problem, so I spent couple hours on the internet researching and guess what, they fixed the wrong thing! The actual problem was “head gasket”! So I go next day to the dealership, they argued with me for 1 hour that it isn’t “head gasket” and that I’m not qualified even to state thing like that. At the end I was able to convince them to do the test for a “head gasket”, next day I got a call from the service guy the test showed problems with “HEAD GASKET”!

Conclusions:
 1. I probably not going to buy Nissan again for a long time(tbd) unless something extraordinary happens
 2. Viva la Internet!

Courtesy of sunface13

I pull credit bureau reports on my self on regular basis it's quite important to keep you credit bureau's information up to date and correct, may be more important to keep it correct. It's important for various reasons and in recession times probably more important than ever. So I follow my regular procedure and pulled credit report online and found inaccurate information on my report so I decided to call TransUnion customer service and talk to them about how to correct the information. I brought up TransUnion web-site where customer service phones are published and since they are located at Hamilton Ontario and it meant a long distance call for me I decided to call toll free phone number, well what can I say I spend about 40 minutes just waiting for the customer representative to pick up the phone, after that I experienced high level frustration because the person on the other end of the line barely spoke English! I got to the India call centre. How do I know? I actually asked the person where they are located and he told me in India. It really concerns me when my SIN number is available to the people outside of Canada. Any way my call to 800 number was pretty much useless. I hung up the phone and took a deep breath. I still needed to update my information somehow. Then it stroke me, what if to call a local number, I mean 905 number. And Bingo! After 3 or 4 rings I heard sweet Canadian guy who was able to help me in a matter of seconds. Conclusion: although I made a long distance call it was worth it every penny.

What is your experience with TransUnion customer service?

How often do you stuck in the phone system?

”Please press 2 for the following options” and then another 5 menus and another and another… So basically you are calling customer service for 2 minutes question and get stuck on the phone for 40 minutes until you get to the real person. Sounds familiar? I used to type 0 and it would take you to the customer representative but with time systems became more complicated and it’s not working any more. Recently I found a website that posts information about how to get to the human. So here is a tool to help you http://www.gethuman.com

Originally triage phone systems were built to help to customer service with workload and provide better service but unfortunately it became not so friendly to the customers.

What is your experience with customer service phone systems?

Click here to enlarge the picture

It happens and quite often recently that customer support service is more like a mocking customer than actual help. First of all I would like to mention that I’m not putting my bills payments on autopilot aka authorized payment s and for the good reason. I don’t do it for the same reason why I don’t like to use my debit and credit cards. I have a rule I check my bills when they arrive. Because we are all people and who ever compile my bill is human being as well and we do make mistakes.

So making story short I follow two rules.
1. Don’t put your bills on preauthorized payment
2. Check your bill when it arrives

So here is my experience with Rogers’s customer service and proof that my rules work for my good.
I received a bill and as usual started to review it and there was one line that didn’t quite make sense for me. Please see picture on the right. As you can see two numbers in red circles don’t much and looks like I’m paying more then I was supposed to. So I decided to call customer service and get clarifications about these numbers. I dialed a number and trough series of instructions I finally got to the regular beep signal. Well what can I say, it took good 40 minutes before I heard representative’s voice. Young lady by the name Cintya was rude and uncompetitive. After 15 minutes of discussions during which she put me on hold 3 times, I asked to talk to the manager which in turn produced astonishing reaction. You don’t want to hear the tirade she said to me. So at the end I simply hang up the phone completely frustrated and losing my faith in good quality customer service. I took a break for the day and called next morning. At this time I spend about 30 minutes waiting and I got sweet guy on the other end who explained that Rogers had invoice system glitches during August and September and that caused wrong number posted on the bill. And oh miracle I got a credit for overpaid bills from these two months. After this story I have a couple of questions: Why Rogers didn’t notify customers about the glitch? That one somehow I can understand big company takes time to get to the bottom. But why customer service is so poor?!

Do you have a story about your experience with customer service? Send it to me I will post it here.