An Oscars / Customer Support Call Mashup

Charles Cooper, Executive Editor, CNET News.com spends two hours on hold with Symantec, and then is asked to pay for the call (and pay a price more than the original cost of the Norton Antivirus 2005 software). My favorite bit:

5:08 How long does it take to answer a telephone? If Clint wins best director, that would make my day.

5:12 Bored beyond belief. Starting to impersonate the Numa Numa guy. My two cats keep their distance.

5:15 How many miles does a phone connection span from San Francisco to India? Mind wandering. I’m picking Hilary Swank for best actress, but Annette Bening was pretty damn great in “Being Julia…

Read the whole thing.

This is the third time in a week someone has posted their experience on a call like this. Instant business plan, for the taking:

1) Set up a call center to call customer support lines on behalf of customers
2) Each person in the call center can be on hold with multiple vendors
3) The call center reps timestamp / document / record the time they’ve been on hold
4) When a live customer support person answers the call, the call center rep connects them with the “actual” end customer
5) The actual end customer has access to the notes made in (3), and further documents the rest of the call
6) There’s something very post-modern about this
7) The revenue model? Competitors can put their ads next to the transcripts of the calls.

(via TechDirt)