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Our research focuses on the structure and incentives of various customer service centers to explain why consumers perpetually experience hassles when seeking refunds.
What we found is not encouraging.
Many complaint processes are actually designed to help companies retain profits by limiting the number of customers who can successfully resolve their complaints.
The best strategy to resolve your complaint is to instantly go hyper-nuclear.
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Why Bad Customer Service Won't Improve Anytime Soon
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(1)
(1)
innovate, v.:
To annoy people.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday December 20 2019, @10:05PM (12 children)
Even the automated systems are getting rude and surly nowadays. It's bad enough that some require you to speak what you want rather than be able to press a number on the keypad. So you say softly, "operator, please." It will reply, "we understand you wish to speak with a representative. However..." and at this point I'm yelling, "Operator! Operator you fucking piece of shit!"
Now, when dealing with people who are angry, everybody wins when one or both parties makes every effort to de-escalate the situation, and even a modern automated system could do that by directly passing the caller to a real representative, or at the very least "softening" its tone of voice. But now even the recordings are getting surly, and using sarcastic and condescending tones of voice with prickly emphasis on certain words.
It's pure evil because these systems make the customer angry so that when they are finally passed to a live representative, the representative often takes the brunt of a primed customer's anger. I don't do that, I will return to politeness when they are on the line, but I will mention in passing that their automated system is terrible and that the greedy Jew manager who designed and implemented it should be stripped of all bonuses and fired. After i earn the live representative's trust, they will go on to say in a hushed tone of voice, "Yeah, ever since Chayim Goldstein became customer service manager, we've all had a hard time with this, and he asked that the automated system be designed specifically to 'Talk to the Goye-Yeem,' whatever that means." At that point we will both have a hearty chuckle and return to life.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 20 2019, @10:22PM (8 children)
The irony of your complaints as you shit up the internet with your racist trolling is pretty epic.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 20 2019, @10:25PM (7 children)
Jewish isn't a race, it's a religion. So Mr Fueled is technically not a racist.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 20 2019, @10:57PM (2 children)
Oh, so that makes everything alright then, doesn't it ? Moron.
As much death, suffering, destruction and bloodshed has been caused by religious discrimination than race discrimination, or any other form of discrimination for that matter.
Discrimination is for barbarians and savages. Only barbarians and savages disagree with this. Humanity is trying to evolve beyond basic darwinism that ruled life on Earth since it first appeared, but it continuously has to drag along the dead weight of barbarians who reject civilization and cling to the old ways. But just like multi-cellular life eventually triumphed over the only form of life that had ever existed for billions of years, and became the dominant form of life on the planet, so the barbarians who reject civilization will eventually be relinquished to the roles that single-celled organisms occupy today: garbage collectors, slaves in ours guts, or a life of misery in the most inhospitable regions of the Earth.
That is your destiny, savages.
(Score: 0, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 20 2019, @11:01PM
Back to your safe space, little snowflake.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 20 2019, @11:34PM
I eat yogurt with live cultures. I'm not seeing a good way to measure multicellular life as dominant. Kind of an odd thought. Yeast are also good.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Saturday December 21 2019, @01:55AM (3 children)
This is factually incorrect: just ask any Jewish person. Judaism is both a religion, and an ethnicity (not really "race": ethnic Jewish people can be of many different races). There's tons of Jewish people who call themselves "ethnically Jewish", which is a euphemism for "I'm ethnically Jewish, but I don't believe the religious nonsense any more". It's not like other religions, such as Catholicism, for instance, where you can simply stop going to Mass and stop calling yourself "Catholic" and stop identifying with it, and suddenly you're no longer Catholic. Honestly, the whole thing is really weird that way. With every other religion I've ever heard of, you have to actually be a believer, or at least claim to be, in order to be counted in that group. Of course, some religions deal very harshly with people who leave the faith: Jehovah's Witnesses will actively shun anyone, including close family, who leaves the religion, and Mormons aren't too friendly to ex-Mormons either--these groups tend to act a lot like cults this way. Islam can be very unfriendly to apostates too, though there's a bunch of different strands of Islam out there so some might be better than others. At least Judaism doesn't have this problem: they don't seem to care that much if one of them stops believing in the religious part. But they still count them as "Jewish" regardless because of the ethnicity part.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 21 2019, @02:28AM (2 children)
"Islam can be very unfriendly to apostates too..."
That's an understatement. In some officially Muslim countries, the penalty for apostasy is DEATH.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 21 2019, @05:48PM (1 child)
And with some christian factions working at a medical clinic where abortions are done means you deserve to die.
If you want to make shitty cherry picked examples get ready to look stupid.l
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Sunday December 22 2019, @08:50PM
To be fair, those militant Christians are smaller in number, and *much* smaller in power, than the Muslims who want to kill people for apostasy. The latter have control of some nations, while the former is really just a tiny minority of Americans or other Westerners as far as we can tell. Now if you want to look at the history of Christianity, that's much worse looking; they used to burn people at the stake in Europe for believing *the wrong kind of Christianity* (not even leaving the religion, just leaving one version of it, or trying to change it). But that was many centuries ago; luckily, Christianity is mostly neutered these days in Western nations, though it's still pretty awful in parts of America, and the most devout in those places are doing their best to spread their awful versions of it to developing nations like in Africa.
(Score: 5, Funny) by requerdanos on Friday December 20 2019, @11:18PM (1 child)
The last time I talked to one of these automated systems that demanded that I inform the automated system exactly what I wanted (it was for a government agency), I clearly and calmly told the system, "I need to return a defective ring to Mordor." -- "Please hold, you are being transferred to a live agent."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 20 2019, @11:20PM
Funny!
(Score: 4, Informative) by fustakrakich on Saturday December 21 2019, @12:38AM
RTFM [cia.gov]
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 5, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Friday December 20 2019, @10:12PM (9 children)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 20 2019, @10:47PM
No kidding.
I tried working tech support(sound cards, speakers, and MP3 players) for Creative Labs when they were still a thing.(the iPod had not been released, but had been rumored about at this time)
I was limited to an 8 minute call-time, and had to make several sales attempts during those 8 min's...with customers that were having problems with our product they had purchased.
Every call:
Reboot device
Update software
Update firmware
If that doesn't fix it, go to knowledgebase
What can I sell your frustrated self?
Yeah, I bailed quick. I was mistaken that I was hired to provide TECH SUPPORT, instead of as additional sales staff.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday December 20 2019, @10:52PM (4 children)
Speak for yourself. My companies' customer service has always been beyond reproach. It ensures that my customers will never stray to a competitor for long, especially given how most companies treat customers lately.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Friday December 20 2019, @11:35PM (3 children)
Obviously you don't work for Comcast, or Time Warner, nor Best Buy or any large bank.
"It is easier to fool someone than it is to convince them that they have been fooled" Mark Twain
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday December 20 2019, @11:53PM (2 children)
Shit no! That kinda thing would flat ruin an otherwise nearly perfect life. It may come with some significant caveats but working for yourself means there's only one asshole giving you orders.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Touché) by DavePolaschek on Saturday December 21 2019, @01:14PM (1 child)
Yeah, working for yourself means only one asshole giving you orders, but in my experience, it was a Much Bigger Assshole. Better to work for a corporate giant, so at least when you leave work for the day, that asshole doesn’t follow you home.
[shudder]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 21 2019, @10:01PM
In my experience, it isn't true that the asshole doesn't always follow you home when you work for a corporate giant.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 20 2019, @11:19PM
That's not necessarily true. Some of us do recognize that companies are made up of human beings, and human beings make mistakes. No matter the process, no matter the "best practices", mistakes will be made, even at the best of companies.
What makes the difference, though, is how the company deals with its mistakes. If they promptly and without hassle fix the problem, then I'll use the company again. If they balk at admitting fault, let alone not fix the problem, then indeed I'll never use them again.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 21 2019, @05:33AM (1 child)
We have Wegmans supermarkets here. Returns are never a problem, even produce that turned out to be bad once you got it home--just keep receipts and stop at the desk the next time in the store.
This must be part of the reason that Wegmans just won the best place to work award again (several years in a row, iirc).
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Sunday December 22 2019, @08:53PM
Why is this modded down? It's a good comment.
Costco is very similar. It's easy (almost too easy, really) to return stuff to Costco if you don't like it, including bad produce. I've done this before. Costco also regularly gets "best place to work" awards.
*I say "too easy" because one horror story I've heard about Costco is someone who witnessed someone returning a Christmas tree there *after Christmas*, and getting a full refund. This is obviously abuse of their generous policy.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 20 2019, @10:23PM (6 children)
Easy hassle-free returns. It's almost as if Jeff Bezos wants his customers to keep coming back.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday December 20 2019, @10:49PM (1 child)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday December 20 2019, @11:59PM
We have to increase Bezos's revenue so he can send all the warehouse workers to The Ditch To Die In™ and replace them with Amazonk Prometheans™. 🤖
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Grishnakh on Saturday December 21 2019, @02:00AM (3 children)
I don't know why this is modded down, because it's true. Amazon has its issues to be sure (affiliates, counterfeits, etc.), but their customer service really is great: if you have a problem, just call them up and they'll send you a new one, or give you a refund, or whatever, just for asking. It does make it kinda hard to stay mad at them for long. I've gotten a couple of free things from them because LazerShip was too incompetent to deliver properly.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 21 2019, @05:58AM (2 children)
They've strung me along for over a year, saying that as soon as possible they will install a handicap-access door switch at the local Amazon store. They can make buttons to order laundry detergent, but not that?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 22 2019, @08:34PM (1 child)
As a disabled person, I would hope you realize that you don't have to wait nicely for something like that. Lawyers would line up to take a cut-and-dry ADA accessibility case like that, especially if you have evidence of email exchanges with them. You get the accessibility options you need, your lawyers don't charge you, and you may get a significant amount of money for your trouble.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Sunday December 22 2019, @08:57PM
I think this varies a lot by region and locality. There's lots of places that simply aren't ADA-accessible, and may never be, and for good reason: it just costs too much and would basically require demolishing whole buildings. Go to some historic district in a city, or to various places in Manhattan, and you'll find tons of places that absolutely cannot be made wheelchair-accessible. I've been in restaurants in NYC that were tiny, and the only bathroom was down a narrow flight of stairs in the basement, and the bathroom was the size of a phone booth. How are you going to make that wheelchair-accessible? You can't, without demolishing the building and making something totally different and more spacious. The same goes for countless historical buildings.
That Amazon store might have been build in some older building, so it might not have an easy way of making it ADA-accessible, and they likely got an exemption for this.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Saturday December 21 2019, @05:21AM (16 children)
A few ideas: First, call customer support for something simple.
This isn't a battle I would choose to pick, but just doing this helps you flush out the bad actors earlier. For example, I've had good luck with Discover, but a lot of the other cards outsource their customer support to who knows where.
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Saturday December 21 2019, @06:09AM (15 children)
I've had similar luck with Indian call centers as US ones. It really depends on company policy.
That they make up English-language names to interact with Americans doesn't count as lying. If locals were unable to spell my name, I'd also make up a new one for convenience. Are user names a lie, too?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by sjames on Saturday December 21 2019, @08:25AM (11 children)
A better approach would be "Hello, my name is (25 syllable name unpronounceable by anyone outside of their home country) but you may call me Bob.". Just as easy and not a lie.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Coward, Anonymous on Saturday December 21 2019, @09:08AM (7 children)
Alexa and Siri aren't real names either (i.e. nowhere on a birth certificate). Calling people liars because of some rule you just made up is a dick move.
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Saturday December 21 2019, @11:15AM
Surprisingly, birth records show that they are "real" names: https://www.vox.com/2018/5/13/17345722/alexa-amazon-echo-baby-name-girls-apple-siri [vox.com]
(Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday December 21 2019, @06:26PM (5 children)
They are also products, not people.
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Saturday December 21 2019, @11:09PM (4 children)
I know immigrants to the US who have adopted Anglo names in their teens or twenties. Are they liars, too? The call center person has probably used that name to talk to English-speaking customers for a while, perhaps years. How many years should they have to wait before they can use it as their sole name with you? How about people who change their names in the US? Should they have to tell you: Hello, my name is X but it used to be Y? Are actors with screen names or authors with pen names liars?
Your implication, that foreigners with foreign names are liars if they later pick an Anglo name, is a moral choice, meant to exclude others from your group. For that reason, I'm calling it a dick move.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Sunday December 22 2019, @12:43AM (3 children)
Immigrants are given legal American sounding names (legal in the sense that it's the name they should use on government forms and to sign contracts), often whether they want them or not. In the case of the call centers, they are generally TOLD to adopt a common American name, not quite the same, and not the actual person on the line perpetrating the lie. They are not trying to integrate into a new culture where they now live.
As for the rest, you're generalizing a comment about a specific context a great deal to generate outrage. I'm not sure why.
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Sunday December 22 2019, @01:25AM (2 children)
And then that anglicized version of their birth name doesn't work out, because nobody knows how to pronounce or spell it. Some of them tolerate the everyday friction and keep using their difficult name, while others pick an easy Anglo name.
You and the previous poster called Indian call-center employees liars for using English-language names. I objected to that judgement-passing because A) I have acquaintances whose situation is not so different, and B) I don't like it when people pick on foreigners.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Sunday December 22 2019, @03:30AM (1 child)
So I guess you'd be really ticked if I said Hermann Göering was an asshole?
But more to the point, note that I said the call center TELLS them to pick an American name and use it, so it's the call center's lie, not theirs.
Note that it's also not uncommon for immigrants to continue using their not at all hard to pronounce birth name or an easy to pronounce shortening of it rather then the one given to them when they immigrate.
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Sunday December 22 2019, @03:49AM
So you're saying that people who lie for work are not really liars? And also that it's ok if people pick new names to ease their personal lives, but not if it's in service of their jobs.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Booga1 on Saturday December 21 2019, @11:10AM (2 children)
I'm in the US and worked in a call center here. This is definitely something I've seen some agents use. However, sometimes it doesn't help. Just having an accent can be enough to derail a call.
Let me tell you about Samir. Samir was in the same training class as I was. I have no idea what his background involved, but he had a mild and very noticeable Indian accent. It wasn't difficult to understand him at all. He was definitely someone I would consider the top of the class. He was smart, friendly, and quite good at troubleshooting everything we covered in class. He was just as good on the floor. He decided to go by the name of Sam, just to make it that much easier for the customers to use his name.
However, I heard a couple of his calls where he could barely get past "Thank you for calling, my name is Sam. How can I help you" when the customer roared into the phone something like, "Goddamn Indian call centers! Get me someone who knows how to speak English, now!" Samir would do his best to try to continue, but sometimes the only real solution was to get a neighbor to take the call. Technically, this was forbidden by policy, but nobody enforced it because management actually had a clue and didn't interfere.
Also, we weren't allowed to give out our location. The most we could confirm was that we were in the US. Part of the reason for this is because there have been incidents of customers showing up on site in the past. Nothing bad happened, but it's just something you don't want happening.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Saturday December 21 2019, @06:59PM (1 child)
Samir was caught up in a tangled web of difficulties that weren't of his making.
Some of it was xenophobia and misplaced nationalism (on the part of the callers). Some of it was mistaking the call center for being offshore outsourced. In general, outsourced call centers have no authority to resolve a problem that doesn't exactly match a problem in the flip book. Offshore outsource call centers tend to be even less likely to be able to escalate the call to someone that has the authority to go off script if necessary than onshore.
Add in that when this whole ugly trend of call centers with no actual authority to do anything but read from the flip book started, those were almost invariably offshore outsourced while the in country call centers tended to actually be the old school ones that were empowered to actually apply logic and technical knowledge to solve the problem.
The upshot of it for the caller is that if you called for support and someone with a foreign accent answered, the odds were you were not going to get the problem solved quickly and effectively. Samir was in the unfortunate situation of triggering that rule of thumb even though the situation didn't actually fit.
Of course, these days, even the onshore not outsourced call centers are often deskilled and dis-empowered.
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Saturday December 21 2019, @07:47PM
All fair points indeed. While we did have required opening and closing phrases, everything else was up to us.
Heck, our knowledge base was even setup with a "Suggestion" button so we could put in an update to an article. If it was correct, our KB team would approve the new content and you would get credit as a contributing author on the article.
I can't imagine how soul-sucking it would be to work at one of those places where you weren't allowed to deviate from a script. Anyone who had a brain would probably rather quit.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Saturday December 21 2019, @01:17PM (1 child)
Yes, and that works in any direction, too. When I was in China, the locals couldn't pronounce my surname, so I introduced myself as "Wang." Now, in China there are so many Wangs that people often put qualifiers in front of Wang, like "Lucky Wang" or "Three-fingers Wang." So I said, "Wang, Big Wang." You know, because I'm tall.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 21 2019, @03:27PM
OK Mr. Wang, Big Wang.
Just don't try to get a ride using Lyft...
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Saturday December 21 2019, @11:22PM
And that's really my point -- the problem lies with company policy, not individual contributors. Where poor company leadership produces negligently-designed company policy and is demonstrated by crappy (non-sales) customer interactions, the idea is to use those behaviors as "canaries" to make your way (and your complaint) up the chain [youtube.com] to confront said policies at a level that only the leaders have the power to address.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 21 2019, @07:59AM
Surprised more people don't use this. In the few issues I've had with large companies I wasn't able to immediately resolve, I went to the BBB. Got a favorable resolution every single time.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bradley13 on Saturday December 21 2019, @09:52AM (4 children)
The underlying problem is this: A lot of customers suck. A lot of customers try to scam companies - and for this reason, the companies put policies in place to make any sort of compensation very difficult.
I have a personal example of this: If you have a leased car, and the person who leased the car dies, the lease ends. You return the car and no more money is owed. My mother died, and had a leased car (this was in the US). I returned the car. Convincing them that I didn't owe any more payments? That was...not so easy. It turns out that it is too common for some idiot to lease a super whopping luxury or sports car. Realizes they can't afford it. So they have someone call in and claim they died. As a result, the leasing companies make this really difficult. Which is just bloody unpleasant when you really are dealing with a death in the family.
So, yes, customer service can be awful. But the root cause often lies with crappy customers, and the company's obvious self-interest in not letting itself be scammed.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Common Joe on Saturday December 21 2019, @10:13AM
I don't disagree with anything you said. However, I feel as if the whole class is being punished for the actions of a few. I don't deserve crap service because someone else is a dick.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 21 2019, @03:29PM
> So they have someone call in and claim they died. As a result, the leasing companies make this really difficult.
Isn't this solved by a certified copy of the death certificate?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by toddestan on Saturday December 21 2019, @04:04PM
Of course, the leasing company also brings this upon themselves by leasing said super whopping luxury or sports car to someone, if they had done the due diligence, would have realized that they are never going to afford it. Yet they refuse to take any blame for this, because [short term] profits!
See also the mortgage crisis a few years back.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday December 21 2019, @07:25PM
OTOH, a lot of customers suck because they figure a lot of companies suck and deserve to get ripped off (and were probably ripping them off first anyway).
(Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday December 21 2019, @08:27PM (2 children)
It's also part of a larger trend of deskilling. They don't want to pay for people who actually know what the product is and how it works (much less, with actual troubleshooting skills or even simple applied logic), to they hire flip book readers and make sure they don't have enough authority to do anything the company doesn't want (even if it may owe it to a customer).
I can understand having a tier with flipbooks to handle is it plugged in, is it turned on level fixes, my objection is wehen there is nowhere to escalate the call (or if there is, they refuse to do so for any reason). Case in point, the controller on my water heater failed under warranty. The only option was to have the manufacturer send the part and have someone put it in (DIY would void the remaining warranty). They wouldn't just send a part you requested, you had to talk to the flip book people and they would send what the flipbook said to send. When they wanted to send what was clearly the wrong part (based on my diagnostic and consulting one of their own training videos), I asked them if there was anyone there who has EVER actually fixed a water heater, the reply was priceless "Of course not, this is a technical support center".
This is beyond people who answer the phone. More than half the time someone comes to your house for warranty service on a major appliance, they don't have any idea how to actually diagnose the problem. This is especially problematic when parts are still under warranty but not labor. I can only imagine how much non-technical people get ripped off by that. I know I have saved over $2000 and a great deal of hassle in the last 3 years just by knowing enough to call bullshit.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Saturday December 21 2019, @11:39PM (1 child)
I've often wondered if writing up the details that you've investigated, maybe with some attached photos, and sending that in would help. That way the customer-facing tier would look at the email, ask "Can anyone read this", get a response of "Of course not, this is a technical support center, nobody's ever actually fixed one of these things", and then forward the email or letter on.
This "amateur demand letter" quasi-legal-process-service approach with its attached paper trail means:
Along these lines, has anyone tried pursuing these issues through the state's Attorney General? I think that's part of their charter, but I think it varies from state to state.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday December 26 2019, @05:37PM
I suspect that's why they on;y provide a phone number. If you find an email or snail mail address they can just claim that since you didn't use the official contact point, nobody actually saw it.
They don't mind being useless, as long as it's not well documented.