Your call has been put on hold…

The state of customer service in India is such that helplines often get an engaged tone or are abruptly cut off after you heroically press 1 for English, 2 for ticket-related queries and 3 for economy or business class. (Representational image: Quino-al via Unsplash)

In the aftermath of Covid and the resultant spike in online dependence, customer is no longer king. With cybercrime getting more audacious, network coverage iffy and the average man’s slowness in getting through to helplines, it is the call-centre employee who is up for coronation. He who fends us off with opaque reiterations and rehearsed apology, putting us on hold mid-gripe so we can listen to soothing music. And just like that, we forget misplaced deliveries and pending refunds.

Only the Mission Impossible theme song can do full justice to the stress and suspense of real life. There are life certificates for old parents whose pensions come to public-sector banks where customer-wooing is so low on the agenda that a heart attack or two among those waiting would go unnoticed. Emotions run high as you are sent to the back of the queue by deadpan clerks. There are attendant to-do lists, like updating Aadhar card phone number so passports can be renewed after new address is added in bank records, where you are back to the same staff who frankly had your measure at ‘hello’.

Oh, the joys of being cc’d on irrelevant mails and being tagged in a stranger’s tweets! Is there a way to monetise all that spam in the inbox? Food orders are cancelled too late and instead of the tiramisu ordered on a greedy whim, a recorded voice on loop says the money will be adjusted against next order. Cabs cancel on you – no, they are not averse to you reaching a job interview on time but they do want you to weigh other career options. Parcels will arrive when you are not home, and they cannot be left at the gate because it is COD. They will go back to sender and come back another day – after complicated phone calls in a foreign language.

Helplines get an engaged tone or are abruptly cut off, after you heroically press 1 for English, 2 for ticket-related queries and 3 for economy or business class. Each time you call back, a new person picks up and asks with polite superiority how they can help you, and before you can unload the backstory and flashback to the recent trauma of forced orchestra in your ear, the orchestra is back.

Amazon will deliver a wrong item, then when you click on ‘replace’, send a gramophone replica! But they do give you fair warning, saying, please cancel and send this back before you even receive the toy gramophone. The psychological damage of receiving what you never asked for is unhealable. Like the 'fun with maths' books on your birthday.

Then they ask us to rate the experience, rubbing salt on a fresh wound. They give us a choice of five stars to click on, and woe is you if you click on just one or two, because they will personally fall at your feet wailing, ‘why, why, why?’ New-age abuse involves a tech-phobic us and a tangled tech maze. The magic words have just been whispered into our ear: aap katar mein hei.