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Archive for June 9th, 2022

Customer Disservice

Posted in Diary, Miscellaneous, tagged on June 9, 2022| 8 Comments »

I understand that big companies believe that they can save money by deflecting as many customer service questions as possible to the FAQs and moron-bots; I also recognize that there are fewer supervisors than regular phone drones, and since they probably get paid more it behooves a company to instruct its employees to try not to pass a problem up the chain of command unless it’s pretty clear they really can’t do anything for the caller.  But once that has become obvious, why in the world do these employees continue to obfuscate, misdirect, pretend it’s the customer’s responsibility to solve a problem on the company’s end, and even lie, rather than just connect the caller to a supervisor?  As you’ve probably noticed, I’m not exactly stupid; by the time I call customer service, I’ve already tried everything obvious that would be listed in the FAQs, and the few times I got tricked into trying the bots I quickly discovered that they’re basically a slower, more time-wasting version of those same FAQs.  So I get pretty annoyed pretty quickly when it become clear that a human operator is reading from that same damned list.  And when they claim they’re unable to do something I need done, I immediately ask for the supervisor (whom decades of experience has demonstrated time and again will nearly always be able to do that which the front-line operator claimed was impossible).  But you’d be amazed how tenaciously they resist granting that simple request, even when I start growing increasingly angry at their insistence that the hundred-dollar billing error was somehow my fault, and even when I point out that they aren’t being paid enough to deal with a demanding, infuriated crazy lady.  I mean, do they get demerits for calling in a supervisor?  Does the company actually want to pay an extra hour’s wages to the operator to not solve the issue, on top of whatever they pay the supervisor for the five or ten minutes it takes to actually solve my problem once I finally get the first operator to grasp that I’m not going to go away and eat the extra charge, accept the wrong item instead of the one I ordered, or otherwise let myself be screwed over?  Why must I always be put in a position where yelling at some poor working stiff who absolutely isn’t being paid enough to deal with me is the only way to actually get my problem solved?  Of all the asinine shit modern companies do, I think this is probably the most incomprehensible and least forgiveable; unfortunately, it also seems to be almost universally unavoidable.

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