Can I get an Amen?

Since May I have been frustrated. I've had that little ping in the back of my head, always reminding me that there's something I have to get done and feeling like I have no control over getting it done.

I flew to China and back on United Airlines, who has a code-sharing program with USAirways, with whom I have my frequent flier account. When I boarded my flights, I gave my USAirways frequent flier number and assumed I would get my boatload of miles (about 16,000 to be exact). However, around this same time, USAirways had its merger and my miles never showed up in my account. I will spare you the details of my countless calls to USAirways (who then told me to call United, who got their fair share of calls). Basically, I was told to fax my info to USAirways and everything should be taken care of. So I did. I faxed it 2 weeks ago. Nothing.

So I called today. Just to see if they even got my fax. The 16-year old (she may have been smacking gum, for what I could tell) asked me for the fax number I faxed it from. Honestly, I don't know that number because I faxed it from a co-worker's fax number (everyone has their own fax number at GE). So she said she couldn't help me. By this time, I've jumped through so many hoops and am so frustrated, I ask her "What can we do to solve this problem?"

And herein lies my argument. People don't think. They aren't trained to think and they don't care if they think or not. I understand customer service is a hard job and I try to be as sweet as strawberry pie everytime I talk to them. And I know how rote and mind-numbing the job can be. But it can't be that these people are lazy. And it can't be that they don't care about helping others. Because solving problems is fun...thinking can be fun. It causes you to be creative and stretch your brain. Her job was to think. Instead, I had to come up with a solution. Here was the conversation:

"Are you telling me that you can't look up my account number and just see if the
fax has come through?"

"No, they come through the computer, so we can only look up by fax number. And we get thousands of faxes a day."

(Thinking creatively. Stretching brain.) "Can you sort faxes by date?"

"Yes."

"What if I gave you the area code and the date and you look to see if my fax came through."

"But we get thousands of faxes a day."

"I bet you don't have a thousand faxes on June 20 from area code 203."

Sure enough, she found my fax. But not without me doing the thinking for her. Isn't it the job of customer service to find a creative solution to the customer's problem? Not for the customer to do it themselves? If we could all just think, train others to think, and problem solve a little bit more, we'd all be happier people...happier customers, happier workers, happier bloggers. Can I get an Amen?