to be !tter serv
Yesterday, I had to call Sirius to deactivate an old unit and reactivate a new one. Despite their stupid voice activated menu system that had no option for what I wanted — am I the only person that prefers to press numbers rather than talk to a computer? — it went pretty well. Once I got through to an actual human, there were no problems, and everything worked as expected. My radio was activated. I was as happy as any Sirius subscriber could be, since customer service reps can’t really do much about the top-40 playlist format that Sirius adopts for every station…but that’s a different entry for a different day.
The day after my call to Sirius, I got this confusing email:
From: Sirius Radio Feedback
To: rjtorres
Subject: SIRIUS Satellite Radio Needs Your Feedback!**** Please do not respond to this email, as this email is automatically generated. ****
20-Jun-2008
Dear Robert,
Thank you for contacting SIRIUS Customer Care.
We continually strive to provide you with the highest quality support and service, and your comments and suggestions enable us to be! tter serv
That’s the email, verbatim.
I usually ignore this kind of crap, but the illogic of the communique grabbed my attention. Let’s think it through: Sirius sends me an email that says they “need [my] feedback.” Then, the email — with 4 asterisks and bold — implores me not to respond to the email, which seems to be the primary way through which I could give them my feedback.
As you can see, the email closes rather abruptly, as if it were the final message being penned aboard a sinking ship, with a wonky, dying satellite connection to the Intertubes. I find it hard to tame my overactive imagination, and I’ve now imagined that Sirius, keen to avoid minimum wage and labor laws, has rented out a giant old cruise liner. Setting sail around the world, always in international waters, with a complement of hundreds of customer service reps chained to their workstations, Sirius runs the tightest ship in the customer service biz. But then, disaster strikes. The ship hits an iceberg, or collides with an old mine laid by competitor XM from before the merger talks. As the ship begins to take on water, the captain screams, “Quick, before we sink, get that email out to Robert!” Ever faithful to her corporate taskmaster, the chained rep types as much as she can, and hits “send,” yet the missive is incomplete. As the briny sea fills her lungs, the rep drifts off into the dark fathoms thinking, “…if only I could have finished that email…”
The more likely scenario, however, is that Sirius has failed to notice that their email system is screwed up, and some poor sap in a cubicle somewhere is sweating because the response rate on his customer service feedback instrument is 0. Regardless, if a company is going to communicate with me — particularly one that can put a fucking satellite into space and then beam radio down to me — I’d expect at least a complete email. In the absence of that, imaginations like mine can surely run wild.
