We don’t do scripts. In fact, I’ve created my own slightly-altered version of the company Call Monitoring score sheet. Mine has a new field added: “Sounding Like The Automated System”. If, when listening a rep’s discourse with the customer, I find myself waiting to hear them say “Press 1 to repeat this message. Press 2 for more options. Para español, marque el cinco,” the box gets checked. It’s mostly a joke; the other reps get a kick out of it because they don’t want to sound like robots anyway.
As regards the PhD, though…do you truly feel your education has anything to do with the quality of service you ought to receive? I agree with you that, after you requested non-RFID cards, and rejected the sales pitch the first time, the representative should have shut up and sent you the regular cards; I don’t like pushy CSRs any more than you do. Nevertheless, my experience in customer service has taught me that people who bother to mention their level of education during the call don’t usually want to “helped”, per se, so much as they want to assert their superiority over the folks at the call center. I don’t have a doctorate, Comp Sci or otherwise, but I’ll bet significant money that the guy whose first words to me are “Actually, that’s Dr. So-and-So” still doesn’t know more than I do about banking…and if he does know as much as he insists, he needs to fix his own problems instead of calling me, as I clearly don’t possess the intellectual wherewithal to even understand his issues, let alone do anything about them.
Maybe you were just being facetious, and you don’t actually level your degree at phone reps as evidence of your mastery of all possible topics while insulting their own professional abilities in the process. I hope this is true, and if it is, please accept my apologies…it’s just that, after hearing the twentieth Mr. or Ms. “That’s Dr.” rant at me for fifteen minutes because their card is declining – due to the fact that they never bothered to activate it, which, if they’d stop asserting their immeasurable genius for a few seconds, I could easily fix – one grows a touch weary of the general attitude.
Our credit card division consists entirely of reps with at least a year’s experience in Retail Customer Service. Those would be the folks you get when you call 1-800-BIGBANK – fake number, obviously, but our number is the name of our large corporate bank – hence, they’re the ones who deal with everyone who gets pissed off and calls us in a blind rage looking to bite someone’s head off. Therefore, yes, they have had some prior experience with angry customers. 
(I do note that you said “training”, and indeed the training program does include a unit on dealing with irate callers.)
That depends. You might be surprised how many people call and ask to be connected to a certain department when in fact that department either wouldn’t be able to help them, or could provide only the same service as the rep who took the call. If you called me, and the only information you gave was that you’d like to speak with a Rate Specialist (which sounds a lot like some bank’s euphemism for the Underwriting department), I’d figure the most likely reasons for your call would be either a limit increase or a rate decrease, both of which I could easily process for you if you met the criteria, or else a breakdown of our current rate offers, for which you’d actually need to speak with Sales. In any of these cases, to fulfill your request would be a waste of your time.
Now, I certainly wouldn’t presume to tell you you were wrong about with whom you wanted to speak, as that particular rep did. I would, however, politely ask the specific reason for your call. I would do this to avoid transferring you to the wrong department, thereby forcing you to hold again, only to be transferred back, having to hold AGAIN, and finally end up back on the phone with me, now even more annoyed than you were to begin with. Just one simple question from me, one brief response from you, and you’re on your way.
On the other hand, if you do call and ask for a specific person – as in, first and last name – you’re getting transferred, no questions asked. If you know who John Pantolaqua is, I assume you also know what he does and why you’d want to talk to him. Departments…based on the track record, not so much. Blame the morons who only think they know what they’re doing, because they outnumber you by 100 to one.
We, and every issuer of which I’m aware, can do this upon request. It usually takes one statement cycle to go into effect, but beyond that, you can change the date to whatever you’d like (though some companies won’t allow you to choose the 29th, 30th or 31st because of that pesky February issue). If you’d like a more convenient date, give the bank a call; they should be able to switch it for you. In fact, it’s so simple that I can only think of one caveat: make sure that they understand that you want to change your BILLING date, and not your statement CYCLE date, as the two are usually different by a good couple weeks at least. Give them the date you want your bill to be due, and they can adapt your cycle date to fit the request.
Hey, depending on your tastes, that might qualify as a monthly bonus. Maybe we ought to include it as an option for the benefits package. I’ll run it by the Diversity team; thanks for the suggestion. 