Companies are increasingly side-lining their customer service functions.

As you ring your telecoms provider, you brace yourself for the barrage of excuses, empty apologies, the side-stepped questions relating to their competences, listening to the “we will not tolerate abuse" line when you express the slightest hint of frustration at their lack of skill & competence, the heavy sighing down the phone from the frustrated operator, followed shortly by having to listen to all the reasons why the person on the other end of the telephone cannot do - even the simplest of things - what their employer pays them to do.

All, of course, spoken in such broken English that you can barely understand what they're saying in the first place.

Let's not forget to throw the obligatory long-distance crackly phone line into the disaster that's about to unfold in about 45 minutes time, which will be when the operator learns how to actually answer the telephone.

Yup, enter pretty much just about every major global corporation in 2025. Imagine spending millions of dollars investing in a new product, only to spend not even 1% of your budget on resources for caring for the very people who help keep you from having to claim unemployment benefits.

This short-term thinking can cost you as well. The UK sub-prime loan provider 118118Money was referred to the UK's Financial Watchdog in 2022 after they continually demonstrated a lack of skill, care and diligence towards customers - in addition to failing to meet the communication needs of its customers by employing staff in the Philippines who did not have an acceptable enough standard of English to be able to communicate effectively enough to customers.

One customer even had to have their UK-based, English-speaking complaints department explain what went wrong after the customer was concerned that the direct debit mandate had not kicked in, causing him to miss a payment. Why? Because the employee in the Philippines could not property address the customer’s concern due to the poor English vocabulary she had - apart from the times where she was reading from the clearly well-rehearsed script they’d given her.

Take EE for instance. I was threated with being arrested because their employee mistakenly placed a hard search marker on my credit report. Instead of apologising for their mistake, they went out of their way to make me out to be in the wrong, they told me they "don't really have a credit reporting department" when I asked for their contact details.

I asked them to show me the law stipulating where it is an offence to make a complaint against a service provider.

Of course, crickets were heard.

Customer service no longer provides a service to customers: it provides a service to the company. The people hiding in the back know they’re going to get screamed at, they know they’re out of their depths, they know they messed up your account, added incorrect information to your credit report, gave you conflicting information - so now they’re hiding behind some agent sitting 12,000 miles away in some third world war-torn country that only has 1 hour of electricity a day, reading from a script whilst chucking $2 at them every hour for the privilege of being used as a human shield.

If you want to speak to a manager, the standard answer is that none are available. You want to raise a complaint? "We will pass this to the relevant department". Did you want to speak directly with XYZ department? They don't take calls.

You want to chase up an on-going issue because they have not bothered to keep you updated? "You will need to wait, we don’t have a direct line to that department".

You want to get anything done? "We don't do that here - you will need to speak to XYZ. They’ll get back to you in 7 - 10 working days."

We don’t do any of that.

Unlike 118118 Money, EE, Comcast or Standard Life, we don’t cheap out on the little things.

We have managers who actually manage, we have staff who’re paid to use their brains, & who can actually speak fluent English.

American consultants, engineers & support services. All based on US soil.

If you ask us to do something (within reason!), we do just that.

Every engineer or consultant is a phone call away.

If you’re looking for a trusted partner, let’s have a chat.