Hello,
I'm Mervi Eskelinen!
An artist, nerd and sorcerer, dedicated to make world softer and better for everyone, and to get you to make more art. Make art, change the world!
O service, where art thou?
As you may have noticed from my Flickr, we had a little Summer vacation trip on the Finnish countryside for a couple of weeks. But as any vacation, this one had to come to it’s end and on the other day we purchased train tickets from the VR Journey Search, their online shop.
VR Journey Search is not the easiest to use, not even for someone who has practically lived most of her adult life online. For instance when we tried to buy the tickets the Journey Search gave us a weird notice, something about advance benefit ticket (in Finnish ennakkoetulippu) not being refundable or changeable. When we tried to find info about this on the VR website, there was no info about it. Frankly all the info from the VR site was very hard to find. We chose to collect the tickets from station instead of printing them, since we didn’t have a printer available.
After apparently a successful purchase of the tickets we tried next day to collect the tickets from the R-Kiosk of Siilinjärvi, since they don't have a customer service at the Siilinjärvi train station and since we had misunderstood some info on the VR site. The person behind the counter at this R-Kiosk wasn’t much of a help (she was pretty rude) and we made a call to the customer service of VR, VR Customer Care as they like to call it. The customer servant kept repeating that the tickets purchased from their online service can only be printed or received as a text message. Even if I tried to tell her I didn’t choose the E-ticket option from the online store, she told me this was the only thing I could have done.
Finally after I had got really frustrated and even more confused than I was at the beginning of the phone call the customer servant did agreed I could collect the tickets from the station. The tickets could be picked from R-Kiosk if they had had been booked them through this same customer service. The customer servant made it clear to me that I should have read this info on VR website instead of making this call to her. Yes, I had to pay extra to make this call and yes, customer service was what this person on the other end of the line was doing for her work and was getting paid for.
Customer service is in many cases the only real contact a customer gets to a company or an organization. Because of this it should be treated as the foremost marketing and pr. Unfortunately customer service is also amongst the first departments where the organizations make cuts. I have worked in a couple of customer service positions and in most cases the customer service department was treated in a way it made the employees to feel embarrassed about their work. From this point of view it’s not a surprise the person at VR Customer Care was annoyed by the fact she had to do her job.
And it’s not a surprise customer service is where the most organizations fail.
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