🤬 F*ck You I Won’t Do What You Tell Me

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What’s the most sweary song you know? Eminem? Rage Against the Machine? Limp Bizkit?

I now know the answer to this because, over Christmas, I had to play these songs down the phone to an Amazon call centre agent. And it taught me a lot about taking ownership of the customer experience.

Let’s rewind a bit to that dreaded moment when my oldest son said ‘Dad, for Christmas, can I get an Alexa? All the other kids have one!’. I was ready with my list of reasons why this wasn’t going to happen when son number two chipped in with ‘yeah, we want an Alexa! Alexa! Alexa! Alexa!’

I could see this wasn’t going to end as I’d hoped. So, we wrote to Santa and asked him to research the best Alexa for kids. Santa replied in the form of a link to an Amazon page, and an Amazon Kids Echo Dot.

The product is sold on parental control – ‘Parents Dashboard! Bad language filtering! Usage timers!’- and access to the Amazon Kids+ service: Stories, Games, Music, and more. It had good reviews and a Black Friday price, so Santa sent one on the way.

Fast forward to Boxing Day, where it’s out of the box and ready to go.

‘Ok boys, it’s all ready!’

‘Thanks Daddy! Alexa, play the Arctic Monkeys!’

(Several seconds into the song)

🎵The band were f*cking w*nk and I’m not having a nice time🎵

Delighted shock ensued.

‘Dad! It said…’

‘I KNOW WHAT IT SAID’

‘But why is it being so rude!’

‘I don’t know! It shouldn’t be!’

Hence how I ended up in fits of laughter on the phone with a bloke from Amazon, as he repeatedly asked me to play a song full of swear words so we could see if the profanity filter was working. Reader, it wasn’t. And reader, Limp Bizkit’s ‘Hot Dog’ has ‘forty-six “f*ck”s in this f*cked up rhyme’.

The more interesting thing – professionally, at least – is how this issue was – or wasn’t – resolved.

‘Ah, I’m sorry, you’re playing music through Apple Music, so you have to speak to them, not us’

‘But it’s your device? And you said it would stop swear words?’

‘Yeah, only if they’re played from Amazon Music. Would you like me to sign you up for a subscription?’

Cue a conversation with Apple, and a similar ‘it’s them, not us’ response.

Lack of ownership is, I think, the biggest problem customers face at the moment. Problems passed from person to person, department to department. And now, with platform providers a major part of our lives, company to company.

I’ve had friends tell me about a Deliveroo order that was missing the rice, which Deliveroo blamed on the restaurant, and then refused to take the order back, leaving it in a bag outside their house. 

I’ve heard tales of someone buying a pack of specialist sausages for Oktoberfest, which were ‘delivered’ by being thrown over the gate, left to the mercy of the local hungry fox. The shop blamed the delivery company, but surely, they chose them in the first place? 

And that’s before we get to social media, with Facebook and Twitter’s role in the gradual destruction of democracy (or the enhancement of it, depending on your view), throwing their hands up in the air with the ‘we’re just a platform, we’re not responsible for the content’ defence.

(I should point out, in fairness, that this isn’t a new thing. I remember working in one of the HSBC branches and sending a customer back-and-forth to my friend who worked for Halifax down the road, to try and sort out a payment he’d made between the two. My friend, equally thinking it was our fault, repeatedly sent him back. ‘You go and tell Gareth that John said…’)

But all is not lost. There are sparks of hope. After my last article, about the struggles I had with my new electric car, the team at VW (who I hadn’t named) got in touch. They asked to understand the problems I’d been having with my charger and the response I’d had from Ohme, the charger manufacturer. Even though it was Ohme’s issue, they offered to take it on, and get one of their team to look into it, working with Ohme on the issue. This wasn’t just to help my experience. It was, as they said, ‘so we can stop other customers having the same problems in future’.

Thank f*ck for that.

Thanks for reading this article, I really hope you enjoyed it. You can subscribe to my monthly newsletter below, find me in picture form on Instagram @johnjsills, or in work mode at The Foundation and LinkedIn.