Since I am an old fart that means I receive a nice social security check every month.  It’s great.  Wait till you get one!  It’s like free money (even though I paid it in for a long time).

Anyways, a few weeks ago my checking account got corrupted. The account that was corrupted was the account that my social security check was automatically deposited into every month. Now that the account was corrupted,  I needed to freeze the old account and open a new one.

Worried about my nice social security check, now that it had lost it’s landing strip, I traveled down to the Social Security office to give them the information on my new account . . .  routing number and new account number.

The nice lady said my nice social security check would be deposited in the new account—no problem.

But then, about 8 days later, I got a confusing letter from the Social Security Administration.  The letter said that they had processed all the new account information and it would take a month or two for the checks to reach the new account. Confusingly, the letter seemed to indicate that delivery of the check would ‘skip’ a month before the next check was deposited. I read and re-read the letter and could not make sense of it — or at least could not figure out if I was going to get a check for the current month.

I called the 800 number on the letter.  If you are alive in America today you know that calling an 800 number, for customer service information is one of the following . . .

1. A huge waste of time
2. An opportunity to listen to flute music for 30-45 minutes
3. A chance to speak to someone who simply doesn’t care about your problem
4. Risking going insane and throwing the phone through the window.

OR

5. Getting someone on the line that helps!!!

So after I want through the grueling recording litany of “listen closely our menu options have changed”, and “your call my be recorded”,  the options came, magically, to press ‘O’ to speak with a representative.

I pressed ‘O’.   Ken answered the phone. He could not have been more kind, courteous and concerned.  He listened to my gas-bag explanation of the problem closely, and having endured the story, addressed all my concerns within 7 minutes.

Being a guy that wrote a book on customer service, and the universal lack thereof, I strongly complimented Ken and told him how surprising and unusual his exemplary help and manner were.  The total time expired for this entire adventure was less than 4 minutes.

You can call the hospital, restaurant, gas station, airline, cable TV provider, cell phone service center and probably your priest, preacher or Rabbi and you won’t get them, or your problem resolved, in 4 minutes.

What a great way to handle and serve the public. What a breath of fresh air Ken was. What a great formula for ANY business out there for expanding their mission and fortifying their business. WHAT a LOST art!

I’m Paul Karem. Fiddle on this website and I’ll show you how to handle the phone.