Submitted via IRC for AzumaHazuki
Why Is Customer Service So Bad? Because It’s Profitable.
American consumers spend, on average, 13 hours per year in calling queue with an estimated monetary cost of $38 billion. A third of complaining customers must make two or more calls to resolve their complaint. And that ignores the portion who simply give up out of exasperation after the first call. So why is customer service still so bad? Part of the answer is that a subset of companies purposely make callers jump through hoops with the hope that they’ll simply give up. When this happens, the company saves money on redress costs. At first glance, this may seem problematic: what about customer retention and brand reputation? Research shows that companies with a large market share — think airlines, cable, and internet services — can get away with bad practices because customers have nowhere else to go. This may help us understand why some of the most hated companies in America are so profitable.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 18 2019, @02:49PM (6 children)
FYI there's a law in Israel limiting queues to a few minutes and forces companies to leave a "Please leave a phone number for us to call you back to..." message at the end of the wait time that they legally have to abide to by contacting you within the next few days / hours depending on the specific service. They also limited the number of times you can be asked "Please press N for English / Hebrew..." and the number of times they can transfer you between people so the companies won't be able to throttle you with a human saying "Please hold while I'm rerouting you to someone from sales / service...".
It was a pretty decent compromise between consumer rights and raising the barrier of entry for retailers and service providers. Went along nicely with the separate law making it illegal for telecom providers to bundle phones with voice/data plans as well as limiting them from providing content on their own. Went along nicely with the net neutrality Israel has going.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 18 2019, @03:58PM (2 children)
wow that sounds like a bunch of liberal elite gay agenda stuff. are you sure their government endorsed all this? its downright unamerican!
(Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Monday March 18 2019, @05:30PM (1 child)
It could be! Israel is the only country in the Middle East that allows gay people to live.
Israel even allows women to drive! Yes -- women can drive !!!
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 18 2019, @07:03PM
Allowing them to doesn't mean they "can" ...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 18 2019, @04:20PM (1 child)
I have not checked if they are actually legally bound to do it here (Sweden), but they do have a similar system. You just leave a number and they call you up at a later time specified. It only seems to apply to government systems tho, the phone company etc will still fuck you over and keep you waiting.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 18 2019, @05:13PM
That's probably because the government doesn't make money with those calls. If the government needs money, it raises the taxes.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 19 2019, @02:42AM
They can do that with all the Billions of U.S Tax Dollars coming in as aid. Let the israeli khazar jewish rats live without undeserved aid and see how long they last.
Their companies will become worse than those in China [or anywhere else] in terms of customer rape.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Dale on Monday March 18 2019, @02:56PM (3 children)
I manage about 40 construction trailers and 30 sales office locations. Each have an internet connection with local ISP and the sales offices have phone lines. The construction offices move around pretty frequently. I am constantly opening/closing accounts and there are always 3-4 problems on any given day with the number of sites there are. I know the phone code order to get to where I want, but still have to stop for artificial slow down points. Why do they ask for account number given it never carries forward in the system? I get that zip code in theory gets to route to a specific call center, but lately they all go to NC instead of the one close by anyhow. Others seem to drop you into a sales queue no matter what combination of magic buttons you press. One provider's line will drop you off hold after half an hour and simply says it is taking longer than expected and to try later (thankfully I rarely wait more than 3 minutes with that one). It is all pain and suffering for their benefit.
(Score: 2) by Snow on Monday March 18 2019, @04:27PM (2 children)
I'm so sorry. That must be terrible. I'm depressed just from reading your comment. I can't imagine living that telecom nightmare.
How often do you drink at work?
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 18 2019, @04:53PM
"Thank you for asking. To hear an answer in English, press one. Para escuchar una respuesta en español, pulse dos ..."
(Score: 2) by Dale on Monday March 18 2019, @07:01PM
Oddly, you can get used to anything. Most of the time it is pretty routine stuff and I know exactly what I need and what I need to give them to get it done. About every 4-5 months though something comes up that makes me shake my head and go "really? you can't get this very basic thing done without jumping through hoops?"
(Score: 4, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Monday March 18 2019, @03:12PM (7 children)
The days of companies providing quality services or products are long, long gone. It's all about raping consumers for every penny they have now. The sad thing is most consumers are fine with getting raped over and over. (AKA consumertards)
I remember when we only had to worry about products not working, not working exactly as they claimed, or not lasting as long as they should. These days, you can fully expect products or services to scam you, make you re-buy the product, attempt mind control, spy on you, sell your personal data, blackmail you, try to kill you (had that happen), and rape you and your dog bloody.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 18 2019, @05:24PM (3 children)
Well, that's the cause of it happening.
There are lots of stories about US hotlines where the hotline is outsourced to India and the people answering it show extremely bad English skills, to the point that communication is almost impossible. The analogue doesn't happen in Germany. Why? Well, it's simple: Germans would never put up with this.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hendrikboom on Monday March 18 2019, @10:39PM (1 child)
Maybe Indian outsourcers don't speak any kind of German, let alone unrecognizable German.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday March 18 2019, @11:03PM
If only India was colonized by Germany first. Ah well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 19 2019, @11:21AM
> "There are lots of stories about US hotlines where the hotline is outsourced to India and the people answering it show extremely bad English skills, to the point that communication is almost impossible. The analogue doesn't happen in Germany. Why? Well, it's simple: Germans would never put up with this."
In France, most of ISP hotlines are outsourced in North Africa : the people answering have French skills and accent so bad to the point that most of us hang up the phone and try another call ... until having someone we can undestand.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 18 2019, @07:34PM
And why didn't you sue them?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 19 2019, @08:28AM (1 child)
There should be a law! No?
It's no surprise that rapes would be very much more popular if only rape was "decriminalized".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 19 2019, @10:46AM
it is in some countries
just marry the person you want to do
in some places do them first and you are automatically required to marry her
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 18 2019, @03:51PM (1 child)
What's amazing is that politicians or aspiring politicians want to talk about going after Amazon, Google, and Facebook but they completely ignore the companies that really have little competition such as cable/Internet, chemicals/pharmaceuticals, medical device manufacturers (why are ultrasound devices still so expensive - because the FDA purposely limits competition to keep prices high. Not to mention all of the devices like MRI machines, etc...), etc...
What about copyright and how it has stifled the dissemination of research and knowledge and made certain works impossible to acquire harming our knowledge of culture and its history (as a side note rant, the original music video to the song Mastermind by Deltron got removed from Youtube. The video that's there now is not the original. I can't find the original anywhere. Stuff like this is very common). So much research that can help so many people with specific illnesses are either inaccessible or too expensive to go through all of the irrelevant research that costs money in order to find what's relevant to a specific situation. Or the fact that insulin has doubled in price over the last few years for no good reason whatsoever. Politicians ignore this completely. They go after the wrong targets on purpose.
(Score: 3, Touché) by PartTimeZombie on Monday March 18 2019, @08:28PM
None of your examples are particularly amazing when you factor in the fact that your examples are all of industries that spend the most money bribing your politicians, who then make rules to suit.
Your corrupt government rules your country for the benefit of industry. What might be best for you, as a
citizenconsumer is of no consequence.(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 18 2019, @03:53PM (5 children)
It's not a surprise that their goal is attrition. The longer a call waits the more will drop off. This is an approach health insurance companies employ to avoid having to pay claims. They push back on medical practices that file claims, and pull the "hold please" BS on callers. They hope the effort of the caller is not worth the payoff.
The fact that this is rewarded is a testament to how far we have fallen as a civil society.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Monday March 18 2019, @04:17PM (1 child)
I find no better explanation for the concept then this. It's a matter of attrition, people don't have the time or patience so they just stop. Even when or if they know they are wrong they'll never admit that or fix the problem instead you have to work for it. There is the digital-maze phone system where you are waiting, on hold, pressing buttons to make choices or inserting long identification codes only to be told your position in the queue system and that they appreciate your time and effort and that you are waiting all while telling you that your call is important to them. Then they have to ability to just decline all requests, applications or claims in the first place for "reasons", most people don't bother appealing since that once again requires a lot of time and effort on their part. Usually for very little gain, if you have a lot to gain -- that implies they have a lot to lose so they are really going to put in maximum effort then to deny those claims or making the process as annoying as possible before eventually caving, if it's a medical condition I assume they are just hoping for you to die so the problem will go away.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 18 2019, @07:43PM
"Your call is important to us. It is so very important that we're saving it for a special occasion."
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday March 18 2019, @05:36PM (1 child)
An especially obnoxious consequence is that medical providers find it easier, and potentially a whole lot more profitable, to hound the patients for what the insurance should have paid. The extra profitable part is that they ask patients for their full price, before insurance discounting. Oh, dear patient, the insurer wouldn't pay $90, so now you owe us $500. And, if the patients refuse to pay, even in cases where insurance ducked their obligations, it's the patients who get all the blame. They're treated as deadbeats, the full amount is turned over to debt collectors, and the patients' credit score is damaged.
Health insurers' customer service has somehow resorted to giving customers a load of crap. First, they discourage questioning of the bill. Try to tell you that's just the way it is, and everyone does it. They assure you without offering any reasons at all that the prices are correct, and fair. If you persist in drilling into the details, then they start inventing excuses that are flat wrong. Your bill is very high because ... you got service on the weekend, yeah, that's it. More expensive to visit doctors on weekends, you know. Or, the line item prices are fake, and the real prices are set in a secret agreement between the doctors and the insurers. Or, they admit prices are a bit inflated because those poor starving doctors need to make up their losses from treating all those lowlife deadbeats who can't (or won't) pay their bills. Shame! Shame!
Bad as that customer service is, debt collectors are worse. Very dishonest. They will listen to your explanations, but not because they believe any of it, let alone care, no. They're much too used to dealing with real deadbeats to believe the occasional honest client. They're merely feeding you rope in hopes you'll hang yourself. They don't care if the debt is valid or anything else like that, they only care about money. Threats, shaming, and appeals to your decency are merely tools to manipulate you into forking over money. Funny that they who have no decency try to appeal to yours. If you do pay up, they may just invent even more debt that you supposedly owe.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Monday March 18 2019, @08:57PM
You are not the client of a debt collector, you are the resource to be strip-mined for everything you have, whether it is legal or not.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday March 20 2019, @03:25PM
They are also looking for attrition among employees, so everyone is always entry level.
Here's how it works: Company pays tele-support company X-much per call, with an understanding that each call will last N minutes.
Support company's goal becomes: make sure every call lasts longer than N minutes (even if it's just time on hold), then bill for the overage, cuz overtime is where the money is actually made.
Then fire or drive off employees who, being experienced, don't meet the real goals, while railing on the newbies for not meeting the contract goals.
Source: former employee of such a support company, who observed it in action.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 18 2019, @04:00PM (7 children)
Nothing else to say
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 18 2019, @04:10PM
Listen to khallow's advice, he says [soylentnews.org]: don't buy from them, you'll hurt their bottom line. And he knows economics like the back of his hand.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 18 2019, @04:17PM
Pretty much that, if there's no alternative, then customers can't move away.
So the company will pull whatever reasons to not help and use ressources.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday March 18 2019, @04:40PM (1 child)
One thing to add, monosponies also abuse their positions as monosponies.
Small panopolies too.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday March 18 2019, @05:07PM
How about polys-ponies? (hint: check your spelling, the repetition suggest you got it wrong rather than a typo)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 19 2019, @06:48AM (1 child)
Indeed, we need some serious ball (monopoly) busting.
I recently had the displesure of flying, and OMFG what a shitshow. Sure once you actually got on the airplane and were int he air, it was pretty nice, but getting to the nice part is pure hell. Starting witht he fact you have to get to the airport about 2 hours before your flight, followed by a 45 minute "boarding" process, the whole shit show just wastes needless time. Add to it the classic "oversold" flight, followed by a cancelled flight with no replacement that day, and you get a recepie for disaster.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday March 19 2019, @02:28PM
Actually almost all the problems you experienced come from all the deregulation of the airline industry since the 1980s. There is enough competition out there that the margins are razor-thin per seat and many airlines (good ones) go out of business. Airlines don't have the resources to keep staff and planes on ready standby to ease the lines. They're pulling out all of the stops to keep their industry surviving, not really thriving (self check-in kiosks, for example).
What would fix all of that would be re-regulation and regulated fares. Treat the airlines like the utilities they are, let them justify rate increases to an independent commission, and eliminate things like double booking (and potentially reflux). Make them fund TSA from their own pockets (or more properly make the airports pay for TSA service and then the airport charges gate fees to recoup them, just like in the old days.) Make TSA accountable to the airport authority for wait times and include reimbursement penalties for failure to manage their lines timely.
For places that have multiple routes, if the players can't compete on price then they'll have to offer better service for the same money to outdo the competition.
All of this may mean increased ticket prices to you. But it would be one way to try and ensure you get the service you're actually paying for, instead of wanting Cadillac service while paying Yugo prices.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 19 2019, @04:32PM
Well, we could say that the fix is pretty obvious,
Get Money Out of Politics.
As long as the US is a plutocracy, none of this will change.
(Score: 2) by lizardloop on Monday March 18 2019, @05:06PM (8 children)
From a small business owners perspective you do sometimes end up giving customers the run around because they suck up all your time.
We have a few customers who will regularly submit bug reports for incredibly spurious hard to track down stuff. Most of the time it turns out to be nothing or user error. Eventually we just have to start giving canned responses to their requests and ignoring them or we'd literally spend all day chasing nothing and achieving nothing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 18 2019, @05:10PM (3 children)
Lemme guess: release early, release often?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 18 2019, @07:25PM (2 children)
A quote from silicon valley:
"if you're not mortally embarrassed by the quality of your initial release, you've released too late."
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday March 18 2019, @09:11PM (1 child)
So you're saying, Microsoft released every version of Windows early?
:)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday March 18 2019, @09:29PM
That, and they have no shame.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday March 18 2019, @05:40PM
It's true some customers should not be taken seriously. There's even the phrase of "firing the customer" to describe the right thing to do in that situation, namely break off the relationship.
That's not what this article is about though: This is large numbers of customers with a legit complaint who are intentionally being frustrated into giving up the money or service they're legally entitled to. Especially when combined with a series of Supreme Court decisions that have made it basically impossible for consumers to sue businesses no matter what the business does, it's economy by extortion.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday March 18 2019, @06:57PM (1 child)
I wonder ... is the runaround the best way to handle that problem? Why not be more direct, just courteously tell them that you have done all you can afford, but you have other needs and other customers who need your time.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Monday March 18 2019, @08:50PM
They don't want to be too on the nose of politicians might not be able to come up with enough excuses to not fix the market failure.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday March 19 2019, @04:52PM
That's when you move bug reports to a public forum and let your other customers call them out for you :)
(Score: 2) by DavePolaschek on Monday March 18 2019, @06:53PM (2 children)
Just this morning a friend was telling me about the trouble he's had with CDK [wikipedia.org] and a forms system his business bought from them. Included in the price was five days of training. The trainer didn't show up on Monday, and was hostile and uncooperative on Tuesday through Friday. But they're still getting billed for the five days of training.
Their current plan is to keep paying the monthly fees, but continue to refuse to pay for the training and installation. Fingers crossed that they don't just give up like most people would.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Wednesday March 20 2019, @02:58AM (1 child)
Hopefully that works out for them. The one time I saw something like this tried, the supplier knew we were too entrenched with their product and it would be difficult for us to switch away from them, and certainly not in the time frame that they would basically cut us off for non-payment.
So in the end they got paid and nothing changed.
(Score: 2) by DavePolaschek on Wednesday March 20 2019, @02:00PM
My understanding is that they still have a file cabinet of the old forms on hand, and the father of the family-run business is digging in his heels and ready to go shopping for electric typewriters if need be. We'll see...
(Score: 2, Informative) by realDonaldTrump on Monday March 18 2019, @07:27PM
Like a Family business. We love to hear from our many great supporters (please, no gifts unless they're very special). So keep the calls -- the very positive ones -- coming. And by the way, we love EMALS, I'm the first President to have EMALS. Can you imagine, if Crooked Hillary was in here? No EMALS. She'd bring in a guy from Middle East. A magician. And he'd make all the EMALS disappear. Poof! whitehouse.gov/get-involved/write-or-call [whitehouse.gov]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 18 2019, @07:46PM (2 children)
>Research shows that companies with a large market share — think airlines, cable, and internet services — can get away with bad practices because customers have nowhere else to go.
Then we need to bring back anti-trust enforcement so that the libertarian dream of customers enforcing what they want by voting with their dollars can come true.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday March 18 2019, @11:54PM (1 child)
LOL - bring in the govts to guard the libertarian dream.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Spamalope on Tuesday March 19 2019, @12:42AM
Just need it to put consumers on an equal footing. If a customer could track/record hold times and per-hour reimbursement for hold time service would improve.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday March 18 2019, @09:07PM
Maybe it would help if you could determine the quality of a company's customer support, and choose to pay more for the ones with better support. I'm talking about buying products from a company with a better support *culture* across the board, not just offering a higher tier of support.
It's something that may not affect the bottom-line *that* much (unless you try to put in real bottom-of-the-barrel "support"), but can be greatly influenced just by the level/style of culture/neglect you choose to instill in it from the get-go.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Gaaark on Monday March 18 2019, @09:14PM
Time to start reintroducing competition?!?
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Interesting) by sjames on Monday March 18 2019, @09:52PM (4 children)
This is strong evidence of a plague of unhealthy markets. In a healthy market, there would be enough competitors out there that businesses would have to provide at least decent service or risk going under when everyone goes elsewhere.
Note that 2 players does NOT constitute sufficient competition. Really if you can count the viable competition without taking your shoes off, it's not sufficient to make market forces work.
This is a pervasive issue. Some of the younger people here may not be able to remember this, but prior to the '80s, if a consumer device needed warranty service, the default was to take it back to the place you bought it. They might want to look it over, but if you pressed, they would exchange it for a new one on the spot. If it was worth repairing, they dealt with sending it back to the manufacturer and then re-sold it as refurbished. For the younger people here, they used to call that "standing behind the product".
A nice side effect of that is that they had a strong incentive to not resell crap.
Now, we're to the point that original providers such as ISPs and cable won't even handle the problem when there is nowhere to pass the buck.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday March 19 2019, @12:19AM (3 children)
Not that I'm disagreeing, but what's the remedy? How to make the markets "healthy"?
And no, I don't think lack of competition explains the problem entirely. As you point out (or at least allude to in a way), retail stores now sell loads of crap, and it's not because all products have monopolies from single manufacturers.
Basically, a large part of what made retail "unhealthy" is consumer decisions. Consumers have spoken: they'd prefer a cheap product over better service, they'd prefer a cheap product over a reliable brand. They claim they want to pay a little more for quality, but it truly is only a "little" more... Really, they want deals.
And deals they have received. Couple that with what I think is the largest problem: the destruction of the seller/buyer relationship. A couple generations ago, stores treated customers well because stores mostly were small specialist affairs in a local setting. Customers got to know the sellers and to trust them. If you screwed people over, it'd get around the neighborhood, and suddenly you'd have no customers.
That's basically what kept people honest: you actually had to look your customer in the eye and keep seeing her in church on Sunday or whatever. Big companies carried on that tradition of service because they knew they could only compete with local trusted shops if they similarly provided quality and service.
But then the big companies became too numerous and they offered cheap deals that undercut the locals. They could offer variety a small local shop couldn't. So, the local shop disappeared. And gradually, the big companies realized that they no longer had local competitors to keep them honest..
So they could screw people over, and the only people they had to worry about were other big companies who were also eager to screw people over for a profit.
Cable and ISPs, etc. entered the game when this decline was already well underway in existing retail and service. They were helped along in their bad behavior by monopolistic opportunities they were given, but as you note, the problem is much wider and older than this.
So how to fix these "unhealthy markets"? Because I can go to Amazon and have loads of choices for products, and the vast majority of them are crap. Choice alone does not solve this.
(Score: 2) by Pav on Tuesday March 19 2019, @03:59AM (1 child)
Don't blame customers for the monopolies having so much free cash they can just buy out any new competition.
Look to the society with the largest number of multinational companies per head in the western world - Sweden. H&M, Husqvana, SAAB, Volvo, Ericsson... I hear they can even make fighter aircraft and submarines on time and under budget. How is that efficiency achieved? Even the bottom of society has the means and time to make choices on other metrics than price, and the top of society is taxed heavily enough that they must work HARD to maintain their share of the nations productive capacity... not simply come from the right legacy.
With such low tax and transfer since Reagan the US has come to run a hereditary B team on the top levels, and with ever fewer free dollars on mainsteet there's not much point investing there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 19 2019, @04:36PM
That's an incredibly cruel slur to B-Teams.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday March 19 2019, @06:52AM
I'm not going to pretend to have all the answers here. But I do have a few musings and observations.
Smith warned that this sort of thing would happen if we handed out corporate charters too freely and if we failed to hold corporations to their charter, including the part about being for the public good. We have so thoroughly ignored his advice that people have forgotten entirely aboyt Charter specifying line of business or the public good requirement, and for that matter that corporate charter is a grant, not a right. Even the government should stay out of the market croud seem to have forgotten that corporations are a creation of government.
Consumers are laser focused on price because that's the one mark of value that hasn't been cheated to death. Stellar warranty service may or may not happen. The "quality name brand" product turns out to be the cheapo no-name with a veneer. Most consumers have no way to judge the quality of electronic components even if they were allowed to take the cover off in the store. People might well be willing to pay a bit more for quality if they had some way to reliably determine the quality of thing on the shelves. The one and only reliable metric is that $85 < $95. Throw in 30 to 40 years of wages not keeping up with inflation and there you have it.
I know in the EU, minimum warranty is set by law and retailers must handle the returns, not palm it off on the customer. It seems to help. While we're at it, it's probably past time to give the FTC it's teeth back so it can enforce truth in advertising.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 18 2019, @10:31PM
When I know I'm going to be on hold for awhile, I settle down with some work and the speaker phone sitting next to me. Tune out the music on hold, ignore the, "We value your business" drivel and wait for a person.
When I wanted to start land line service at a new house with Verizon about 10 years ago it was, iirc, 7 hours on hold before a person answered. They were shocked, shocked I say, when I told them that I'd gotten a day's work done while waiting for them! After that the customer service person was quite friendly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 19 2019, @02:36AM (1 child)
This was all explained in Jack Welsh's book about managing GE around 25 years ago. Kill anything that's not a profit center. Cut back on cost centers as much as possible. Guess where customer support is on that spectrum...
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday March 19 2019, @02:33PM
Not to mention kill off your least productive 10% of employees every year, no matter the reason. That also forces a lowest-common-denominator of service because the associates working hard to go the extra mile for the client ends up being penalized for taking time they should have been stroking other clients and thus making more on average. (Extra service rarely results in immediately measurable extra profit for a company).
This sig for rent.