Ignorance and Insanity: Contractual Rights:

I deal with a lot of customers who purchase contract cell phones on a regular basis.  I also deal with fishing licenses and many other specialty goods requiring their own licensed and contracted equipment.  One of the biggest problems I have with these contracted goods and services is not that the contracts themselves are 'needed' or even exist as a possibility.  No, it's that neither the customer service department for that good or service nor the customer seem to even both reading any of the terms of the contract to which they are agreeing to.  On behalf of the customer, some ignorance is to be expected as they don't typically take the time to read over the full terms prior to making their decision.  With regard to the amount they show, and the amount the customer service departments for those goods and services clearly lacks understanding on, something which they should at least have a rudimentary understanding of, if not a very thorough training on the most common issues it addresses with regard to the service they provide.

If a customer service representative on the phone is in a department of a business that has them contracted to help resolve a problem with phone activation, for example, and they claim to be unable to help beyond one minute, then clearly they do not understand their contract, as it takes more than that amount of time to get through explaining the problem and continuing on to trying more than one solution.  Telling me that their screen does not allow further input past the one minute, but they are still able to read the screen, is not only a waste of both of our time, but if all the information is there, even if unable to edit it after the one minute, then at least they can aid in verifying that said information gets put into the same fields when appropriate.  Which I made a Verizon support tech do over the phone for a total of nine minutes and lo and behold, the information which they 'could not provide me if I wasn't on the right screen yet and I'd have to hang up and dial again once I needed it', which would have taken over five minutes of going through the system to have to then explain all over again and have less than a minute before having to redial again...  That information I needed was all on their screen even while it locked them out of editing anything.  There were six times it took over a minute to go from one step to another through the entire process.  With what he claimed was needed to be done, I would have been on the phone not nine minutes during that process, but over half an hour!  And I had already spent more than that with the first attempt before the terminal froze up and had to be restarted twelve times before functioning properly.  That was something I knew the contractual rights well enough to know he was not allowed to hang up without a mark against his performance there, and that I had a right to help the customers in our store who were buying his employer's service.  Likewise, a different but similar department had the same needed for a direct customer service center, rather than third-party retail customer service center.

That incident, and several others today and others during my time employed where I am show me how much some employees will do to try to avoid work they may feel is unnecessary, but prevents further work from their fellow workers and others involved on the other end.  The Minnesota DNR, as another example, contracts out their license system from other companies that design a framework for their sales.  This system over four years ago was already old, but it worked properly for what it was, only having glitches when the state servers were down, or a power outage made the machine need to be restarted after booting back up, or someone accidentally unplugging one of the cables, or someone forgetting to load one of the rolls of paper, or someone using the wrong code despite there being a guidebook and the code's name on the prompt screen.  All of these problems can be attributed to minor human error that can easily be corrected, or nature and out of the hands of any until another issue is resolved elsewhere.  However, when the state was looking to consider renewing the contract or going with another provider, a different company bid lower...  For a completely new system with newer terminal technology with completely new servers.  Consistency and time-tested reliability was thrown away for the glamor of sophistication...  Which lead to the machines being sent out late, and even once arrived the state servers were not up and running for another two weeks!  All those lost sales state-wide...  Worse, for the month following the system had at least nine problems a day requiring a restart of the terminal and lengthy process to reconnect to the servers.  Sure, it got the bugs mostly, well, slightly worked out after four years, but the contract was in violation of its terms of agreement with regard to when it would be working and its operational status, as well as several other infractions regarding the quality of service.  Still, the state still uses the newer system because they made a contract which the other party violated enough to end said contract...  And yet the state will not end it.