But in recent years (at least here in India), under the tag of “no human interaction required” they have tried to increase the number of possible options like anything leaving very little scope/space for you to speak to a customer care exective. You are confused between the given choices and in most of the cases they (almost) all prove to be useless.

Easier said than done, I fear – and there are lots of horror stories about making the change (irrespective of where the change is from and to).

Here’s a nice little trick my bank plays – whenever my balance goes over a certain amount they send me a letter telling me that they’ve been trying to contact me without success and would I call them. This means I pay for the phone call where they try to sell me something !

Talking of expensive phone calls – I had a phone call yesterday from someone telling me that my computer was reporting errors to my ISP and some files were corrupted. They wanted me to log on to some website and hand over control through Remote Desktop Connection so that they could fix it for me. (Strange – but when I asked them which files were corrupt they hung up.)

I’ve found that sometimes that works, sometimes it just hangs up on you.

As ridiculous as it sounds, this happened for real with my mom’s phone provider. The help desk agent kindly asked me for any number where he could reach me in case of a necessary callback. On my next call I got directly to an answering machine with no option to get through to helpdesk. Calling with a different ID, I was able to get back in. Solution: Found and changed to a better provider, told the old one in a letter, told all my friends and fellows, and many of them changed to the other provider as well. It’s the only way to make them understand what customer satisfaction means – so perhaps you’re in need of a better bank?