Its funny that I have just bought the book “Beat the Taxman”, have a meeting with the accountants on Thursday to do guess what – yes, BEAT the taxman, and yet if a Gallup Poll is done on me right now on who has the best customer service in Canada within my experience, it will be…err..the taxman!
Ah well, Murphy’s Law at its best. The taxman’s officers have been the nicest, most helpful people on the other side of the line. They have been prompt, informative and very accomodating to all your stupid, appear stupid, appear intelligent or not-so-stupid-nor-intelligent questions you have since the fiscal year is ending. They often pronounced my name wrong – I had an ‘Okanita’ a few moments ago but hey, I don’t mind a wince because she was helpful and informative, as would any other front service officers should. Unlike….jeng jeng jeng….yes, a rant is coming. Those who are up for a feel-good Oprah style post – go ahead and change channels.
I had the most horrendous customer service experience with the not-so-quick people at Quickbooks. In North America, Quickbooks is supposed to be one of the top selling accounting software (yes, my love-hate relationship with accounting ensues!) and I was rather pleased with it on my first day of use. Then came the 2nd day. I tried to launch it, and a .dll file was missing. So kaput it goes, and there’s no reason to panic. My tech-geek,software engineer who lives, showers and sleep-talk-in-programming-codes husband is always the first to convince me to never rely on technology. And so I didn’t.
I called the customer service number and went literally, from Canada, to India, to US, to Canada and then back to India in 1 hour 45 minutes of talk time. I am not kidding.They had problems from not being able to trace my registry account with them, to not being able to understand how a Windows parallel desktop work on a Mac, to not knowing that a “XXX Crescent’ literally means that – and do not have a ‘street’ or ‘avenue’ comes with it (this unforgivable dumb and dumber faux pas was made by the call centre down south of where I am now ), to making me repeat everything I said 5 times over (in many different accents so they can understand me) and oh yes, the missing .dll file! I can go on and on, but you will be bored. At the end of the day, I cannot believe how much manhour were spent on me, and cost, and my own time over what I deem as, a very simple technical problem. And I thought the call centre standards CAME from North America. I think SingTel does it waaayy better. There.
Now with all this experience, the taxman appear like angels. But seriously, their service officers were a delight to deal with. Then again, who am I kidding. So does the VISA call centre girls, no?
I seem to forget that all who collects money are usually devils with a Rachael Ray grin.