Vlad’s School of Customer Service: Callbacks and Voicemail

One of the joys of business travel is the mandatory trackback week that happens when you make it back to the office. If you’re lucky, someone has listened to your messages and written down the people to call back. If you’re even luckier, Shockey Monkey has logged all the phone calls in your events and you just go down the list. But this post is about the ultimate lack of luck, the one that is accompanied with message playbacks, the whothefareyous, etc.

I’ve written in the past about the basic courtesy of leaving voicemail. Today, I have more gems to share with you.

If your name includes more than one syllable make sure you spell it – twice. Trust me, I don’t know you.

If you left your phone number and the fax picked up when I called, I am deleting you from the callback list.

If you threatened legal action if the phone call is not returned the same day.. guess what, even if I was so inclined to help you all legal threats get a legal review before they are responded to in any way. 

If your name isn’t Steven Ballmer, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Larry Ellison, tell me who you work for. No, Bob, I am NOT going to call you back because..

Never, ever, ever call me while driving your car. I know you can hear yourself think over the 2000W speakers while driving through a tunnel – but I can’t. And I can’t call back the number “704-hey- hey- hey- hey- I- can- be- your-girlfriend extension #19 yes you need a new one”

If you are from the south and you double as the dog track race announcer, please speak slooooooooowly. It’s a toll free number fod gods sake, we’ll pay.

You didn’t tell me why you were calling. Here is how it works. I’m not a government employee. I do not call in sequence. I am not an indian call center. I will not return your call in the order it was received. If you didn’t say why you were calling I am assuming you’re a distributor of luxury anal beads. And thank you for yet another call but as I said the last 20 times, I’m good, thanks.

You’re probably thinking I am making this up jsut to be funny, for what its worth, I’m on your side. I can’t believe what I hear out of the other end of the phone either. But you know what, I’ve encoded it and uploaded it to Vladville so you can feel it for yourself:

“Hi. Umm, I talked with Vlad earlier this week about setting up an ExchangeDefender. Um if you could call me back or if someone can call me back at your earliest convenience so I can get the account set up and some email addresses transfered into it that would be great. Thank you very much. Bye bye.”

Listen to the above voicemail (mp3, just 120 kb, well worth it!)

Thats it – 19 seconds. Whats wrong with that you say? It had no time zone information, no time to call back, no company name, no phone number, no email address, no sepecific reason for the call (yes ExchangeDefender but nothing identifiable to tell me who this is) and finally, for the cake topper: Didn’t even bother leaving his name.