Customer service is dieing

In the 80’s customer service hardly existed and when used was generally easy to get a hold of. In the 90’s customer service was every where but you got to wait hours on hold to receive useless responses from a customer service agent that could not do anything you needed. In the late 90s and early 2000’s customer service became accessible and useful, hold times were down to minutes if anything and the customer service agents could actually help. Now it seems that customer service is experiencing a sudden and unexpected death. Case in point, Vonage, whom I was and I stress the was looking into for VoIP phone service.

Their web site is well designed and provided easy access to all of the important information about their service. I found plans easily and was quickly able to narrow my choice down to two possible plans. I was able to find all equipment information I needed. So far so good, but I still had the lingering question of which of the two plans I needed to pick. Here is where things went down hill. I first clicked the contact link thinking that I would just email them, ask my question and get an answer from a person in a day or so. Once I get to the contact page I am presented with a set of drop down lists to select what my contact was about. So I select plans and then click go. To my surprise I am not presented with a web form but taken to the plans page. Frankly this was the moment that I decided that I would not do business with Vonage, if a communications company cannot properly define the term “contact” then I do not believe they are competent enough to provide the service I am looking for. Also this kind of run around assures me that if I ever have problems with their service it will be very difficult to get it resolved.

Out of morbid curiosity I decided to find out how difficult it might be to contact them through their site. So I go back to the contact page and choose the “Other” options from the presented drop down lists. Now that Has to bring me to a email form, right? Wrong. Instead of an email form I get a paragraph of text explaining that do to high volumes they cannot receive my email. What?!? Upon further reading they do tell me that there is an “"Ask Vonage" online interactive chat agent” in their help section. Oh online chat based customer service, I can handle that. So I go to the help section and click Ask Vonage, a chat window pops up and asks me what my question is. Cool, so I type in my questions and I get back:

“I'm sorry, it's hard for me to understand long questions like that. Please ask again using as few words as necessary. Also, it helps if you only type one question or topic at a time. “

Nice they have a bot servicing their chat based customer support. At that point I was done with them. I did not bother calling the provided 1-800 number, as they have already proven them selves in capable of modern communication, not what I am looking for in my VoIP service provider.

I hope this is an isolated case but I am afraid that it is not. It seems that human customer service is near dead and until A.I. can learn to stop repeating the obvious, our lives will be just a little bit more difficult due to technology.