Mike’s post on signing up for DSL service made me chuckle. He’s right, if someone has to ask how they can give you excellent customer service today, they probably won’t be able to. My personal favorites are companies that use their Customer Service lines to pitch new/enhanced services, when all you really want to do is get what you want to do done and leave. A certain Canadian satellite television service is particularly annoying with their implementation, as every menu item starts with the same pitch.
To escape that little bit of hell, hit pound, and you’ll go to an error message which then re-lists the options without the need to listen to the pitch. If customer service departments really cared, they’d make a call menu diagram available so I knew that I would have to enter 1-6131234567#-3-2-2 instead of listening to crap for 3 minutes. They do it for my voicemail, why not their helpdesk?