Sunday, September 13, 2009

I am not completely deaf and sometimes.........

I have a hard time communicating tough issues over the phone as a customer with businesses. I don't have a TDD and tried working with them via computer but their staff are not the people I need to talk to. They use staff who are not familiar with business issues to communicate the issues to key staff which frustrates the communication more. That delays more which costs more.

So I have my wife who is hearing who deals with the telephone conservations. Sometimes, they won't talk to my wife simply because she is not "Jim" and my wife explains that she is like a relay operator but better. Most of the time they work but some business won't accept her.

How can businesses deal with the needs that hearing impaired people have? There is an awful lot that they can do in configuring those to make communication easier and better, and they do not do that. Not enough attention is paid to that and, as a result, they are struggling to communicate in environments that their best friend would not want to impose on them. They don't treat their customers as their best friends.

We want something that meets our need, and we want it to meet it now. We do not want to wait for months to solve that problem; we want to do it now. Because if you have to wait, they will cause us to lose our motivation, and it makes things much more difficult and at the end, the businesses wins while the deaf/hearing impaired customers loses while waiting to find communication solutions to solve the actual issue.

2 comments:

Discpad said...

Use an internet-based official relay service for businesses that must talk to you directly.

I can still talk on the phone to most people, but if it's a business and the call center is in Bangalore, I use i711.com, as they do the heavy lifting of trying to understand what they are saying.

It also provides you to save a copy of the transcript with a click of the mouse, just like if you had a tape recorder!

Cheers!
Dan Schwartz
Cherry Hill, NJ

Unknown said...

Thanks. I registered and will use this in the future.