Finnish is much too rare a language to be worth outsourcing.  

Ah, the virtues of those nations that had not the power to impose their tongue on those who would serve as cheap labor.

In defense my former brethren in the customer contact centers, often due to software issues there is little that can be done. All they can do is try to make you experience as pleasant as possible, however most companies want to spend as little money as possible in this area.

I worked in the medical device industry, and one would think that given the fact that if we "fucked up" people died that there would be some effort to allow agents to have some down time to decompress between calls.  Rather, they treated us like machines, and allowed the situation to degenerate to such a point that there was literally always a queue, reaching peaks of 45 minutes or more online to reach an agent.

Of course, given that our products treated a condition that was both lethal and very rapidly moving.  It's a virtual certainty that people who were unable to reach us went untreated and were injured, because they were unable to reach us to correct the device error.  Some probably even died, so it goes.

Again, you would think that due to the gravity of our work, there would be an attempt to give agents time to talk to them on the phone.

No, agents were subject to a "talk time" policy that measured their productivity on staying on the phone as short a period as possible.  If your "talk time" surpassed a certain lenth you would be fired.  But you say, such a policy compels agents to take as little time on the phone as possible, and makes it likely that they will miss serious product issues.  However, as any management expert knows, the issue in this case is not a serious lack of intelligence (and ethical integrity) is that workers are lazy and incompetent.

I worked for the devil, but they paid well.  

On a lighter note, if you hear a click and the background noise drops when your on a customer service line, the agent is probably saying something (presumably about you) that they don't want you to hear.

And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg

I had difficulties terminating contracts with a French ISP and a cell phone company, at roughly the same time, last year.

I'll spare you the gritty details, but both of these companies exhibited very shrewd tactics which, in the end cost me over 250 euros. Completely illegal, and they knew it, but they were going on the assumption that I [or any other customer] possessed neither the time nor the means to sue them.  

Finally, 5 months, 250 euros, and hours worth of phone calls, later, I was able to get these companies to cease helping themselves to my bank account. Yes, I could have ordered stop-payments to their automatic billing, but by the end of calls to customer service I was assured that the problems had been solved ... only to find a month later that they'd done the long-arm act again.

My advice: NEVER EVER opt for automatic payment for subscriptions to ISPs or Telecom companies. It most definitely will not 'simplify your life', as the claim goes. It simply gives them the means to bilk you. Which they do shamelessly.

Stick to old-fashioned cheque-writing.

I can't remember where I saw it, but somewhere there was a report or an article about how some companies simply dump customers that are "too demanding" on their customer service.
I'm beginning to think customer service is a massive Capitalist conspiracy to waste everyone's time. We can't be out there revolting if we're always on hold!

Anyway, so much for cutting red tape by privatization. We're jumping through as many hoops as before.

"The basis of optimism is sheer terror" - Oscar Wilde

Could you please, please, please write a diary on that?!?!?!?!?

The local advocates of the multi-insurer system (which I think is a bad idea anyway, but a disaster in a country with a bad health and income situation, yet it is an almost done deal) like to bring up the Dutch example.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

The knowledge doesn't exist in house so you hire a consultant at £500 a day or up.
To do it properly the consultant needs to understand both pieces of software they are supposed to connect in addition to the bridging software. The consultant and the support teams from the larger company and the company they have bought have to work together. This all happens while the people in the smaller company are transitioning into the larger one, and are being reorganised into new departments and moved around, and no one has any documentation because "the team knows where everything is anyway". (Yes, that ISO9000 plaque really is just for show.)

This isn't realistic, but everyone pretends it is: Managers because they don't understand how complex it is, existing employees because they want to keep their jobs and not have to retrain, and contractors because it's a pretty sweet deal - lot's of money and you don't need to do the boring support work afterwards.

• Call in, be on hold for 30 minutes (ample time to build up the right amount of rage), then yell the crap out of the poor sod at the other end of the line. Not very productive, and not very good for my blood pressure.  Let's call that plan B.
  
• Write a letter to the appropriate editor, which will then be duly ignored or receive run-of-the-mill "oh, isolated incident" reply from company spokesperson
  
• File a complaint with the Finnish consumer ombudsman (a governmental institution who's supposed to look after the interest of the consumer), though presumably they've already received numerous complaints
  
• Switch services, and make it abundantly clear to them why
  
• Join a political party, run for parliament, win, then enact strict regulations for consumer service
  
• Go off the grid completely
  

(well, okay, I'm unsure of its internal structure, but in a general sense...)

"The basis of optimism is sheer terror" - Oscar Wilde