Hi friends and followers of my blog,
thanks to God and to my new friends Márcia Dembinski from the VIVO Ouvidoria (Ombudsman) Team and Renan Goncalves Gastao, service technician at VIVO, my own and my familly`s hard suffering period of 3 weeks long consecutive errors, wrong order acceptance and execution, accompanied by continuous bombardment with fone calls, whatsapp messages – especially weird: “digital assistants” – and unplanned and unannounced service tecnician visits finally came to a happy end this morning.
Superman Renan Goncalves Gastão, the friendly and highly skilled and experienced VIVO technician, who solved all problems with VIVO`s installations at our house this morning.
Just to bring everybody up to the same page. VIVO is one of the few big national mobile and fix telefone, TV and internet providers here in Brazil.
During these infinite 3 weeks I have spent estimated 6 hours at the telefone with lots of different VIVO employees from all kinds of different departments, I have wasted valuable time with 2 unproductive visits to the VIVO store in our small town and my familly and I have received 5 visits at our home by VIVO service team members.
On 1 ocasion 2 teams came at the same time. On 3 ocasions a tecnician came accompanied by his supervisor. And as if this was not enough, we spent the whole last weekend without any of our 4 different TVs and 2 independent TV supplies functionning.
The only (very) good – within the bad – was, that our 2 independent internet supplies by VIVO were uninterruptedly working very nicely. This kept my whole familly “alive” during this hard time, last not least because we could at least watch streaming movies instead of TV programs.
This sounds crazy, but nevertheless I continue a great fan of VIVOs services. Simply because their mobile fone, internet and TV - if working - work very nicely. I would rather say, they are the best available around here.
What drove me crazy were the absolutely stupid internal & external VIVO communication and service planning systems and the lots of obviously “innocent” employees whose bad attention increased the problems instead of reducing them.
But my real enemy became the automated communication channels. And this criticism goes far beyond VIVO. This criticism refers to the banks, to the health insurance companies and to many other service providers whom You unavoidably need to contact for receiving information, placing service orders and similiar purposes.
But in my eyes these companies are only jointly responsibl with the “makers” of their channels, means the technology providers and implementers of the technologies. They are for my concern the real miscreants.
We all – I suppose most of my blog readers – have a very positive mindset when it comes to new technologies, digital (our great friend and inspirator Silvio Meira from the Porto Digital in beloved Recife city would call them “figital”) features and environments incl. AI and their application for all kinds of improvements of efficiency, transparency and communication in all dimensions and in many day-to-day processeses of our live.
And I definitely include myself in this affinity to technology in general.
But what irritates me very much are the many inconsistent, totally inefficient, time stealing and nerve-wracking wrong or bad implementations of all these technologies, especially when it comes to communication systems, channels and processes.
The great Charlie Chaplin`s movie Modern Times is still up to date – even in our modern digital (Silvio Meira would call it “figital”) world.
I hate wasting tons of valuable time just by listening to unwanted, many times aggressively shrill and often totally unproductive menu announcements and – when getting there finally – missing selection options in the menues for getting done what I origally intended.
Bots are really unbeatable in this respect. And – misused – AI can support them massively.
I ask myself always, whether these companies – the users and the implementers of such systems – do not check all such totally unacceptable inefficiencies and sort all logical bugs out properly before going live with them and onto us, their – too often – victims?
Are we users finally their vulnerability checkers? What a schizophrenia! The total inversion of the game. Instead of the favored ones we – the customers – thus are beeing turned into the disadvantaged ones.
Other point for my critics. But this goes into the same direction. We all normally use our online bank accounts for accessing and managing our finances. This is wonderful and gives us a lot of autonomy, comfortability and – last not least – security, in the sence of “the safest bank is the bank where You don`t need to go to”.
What highly irritates me is, that every once and a while, when I access my bank account, I note that several features, menues, routines and the general optics and arrangement have changed.
If this has been due to safety improvements, I immediately recall all my criticism. But normally this is simply not the case. For me it appears often, as if children were endlessly playing over there, doing changes just for the sake of change.
Maybe this serves – hidden cameras filming us? – only for finding out, how clever we are in figgering out how all these wonderful new features function.
I could not say it better than good old Rock`n Roll heroe Chuck Berry – To much Monkey business !!!
A few years ago – when the banks were just starting their massive digital transformations – a high ranking insider from a renowned software and project management company in Campinas mentionned to me, that his company had several hundreds of staff working on such projects for one of the biggest private banks in Brazil.
Maybe it`s just to many people working on this kind of projects. Maybe – from customer side (in this example the banks) – there is just much to much “let the children play” mentallity.
But once again my fundamental question. Who finally makes sure that we – the damned customers – are beeing heard and attended? Who from all these companies – service customers and service providers – declares responsability and takes care of our justified interests?
Maybe I – or You – should soon open a customer interest focussed system testing company for banks, health insurances and other services providers ?!
Well, I believe I could explain myself quite clearly with respect to my feeling unwell because of wrong applications and implementations of highly appreciated new state-of-the-art technologies, especially when it comes to their application for customer communication and service processes.
I would be more than happy if You decided to share Your own experiences and opinion upon this to all of us here in the answers & questions to this post.
Thanks for Your kind attention. See You soon again back here in my blog.
I hope You found this post interesting and – even better – helpful, at least for loosening Your tongue and participating in this open discussion.
