Traveling Thoughts

Last week in my english course, we had a discussion concerning customer service over email.  The majority of the conversations didn’t interest me, but there were a few threads about customer service at the University of New Mexico…and it’s more like “What Customer Service?!?”  There are in general 3 ways to communicate with someone when trying to get service, the old skool way of person-to-person, the telephone, or email.  But here at the University, there’s only one way, and that would be person-to-person, even then you don’t get excellent customer service.  The two worst places to get customer service on campus is with the academic advisors and the financial advisors.  Although, I must say that even though my experience with both has been below par, the academic advisors provide slightly better service.  We are provided with phone numbers and email addresses for either advisor, but 9 times out of 10, if you call you’re going to get voicemail and no call back, or if you email you’re going to get a response that tells you what webpage to visit to troubleshoot your problem.  If they had read the email to begin with, they’d know that you already went to that webpage, you already did what it said, and it didn’t solve your problem, hence why they were emailed.

The worst customer service experience that I’ve had lately was this summer with my financial aid paperwork.  Nearly everything is automated, I can do my FASFA online, I can sign my loan online, I can get the University paperwork online, but then I have to go in person to hand it into an advisor.  There’s no more drop box, and if you mail it, it will mysteriously disappear, never to be seen again, and if you say that you mailed it, they’ll respond that it was never received.  It’s a conspiracy, to get as many angry students as they possibly can in to see the advisors and then to not give them the service they need.  “Well, you’ll need to go check this website in a couple of days and if everything’s ok there, you’ll need to go to this website and do this and then go here and do that…”  No, I came in to see you, I did not wait 3 hrs for you to take my paperwork, spend a minute to look at it and make sure everything was appropriately filled in and then spend a minute telling me what I needed to do next.  If that’s the way that it’s going to be, I should be able to submit the paperwork online, and cut the whole ‘go visit the advisor’ out of the already painful experience of having to get financial aid.  And maybe, if I could do that paperwork online, they could provide me with a F.A.Q. section that will answer all my questions because a phone call or an email to an advisor will get me absolutely nothing other than (on a good day) a website that can’t answer my questions.  But that would be asking too much of these poor people that are overpaid for what they do.

In reality, the definition of customer service here is “I’ll wait on you when I’m finished with my personal life, until then, you’re going to have to wait on me.”  And sadly, that isn’t just the theme here at the University, it’s also the theme in much of New Mexico…Where’s the spirit of Customer Service?  Not in New Mexico nor at their Universities.