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.
Customer Disservice
June 9, 2022 by Maggie McNeill
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“I mean, do they get demerits for calling in a supervisor?”
I’ve had friends who worked in these boiler rooms. YES!! They do get penalized when they have to bring in a supervisor on a call. They want calls “resolved quickly” & with minimal cost to the company. They don’t even give “customer service representatives” any real training in the area.
Makes me glad my speech disability keeps me from working such jobs …
The worst I’ve encountered recently is AT&T’s customer support line, where you dial in and get a ‘bot that offers a bad set of categories (where my broadband problem is invariably not on the list) and doesn’t want to connect you to a human. The solution I discovered is to tell the ‘bot that if it doesn’t connect me, I’ll recycle it for beer cans.
This works because it is not an answer the ‘bot is programmed to deal with, so it summons a human to answer the call.
Be careful not to make it sound like an actual threat rather than a joke. Then you’d get a response but not the one you want.
AT&T isn’t just bad at customer (dis)service. A friend of mine was an office manager at a small business where a sales rep from AT&T kept calling, not only insisting on talking ONLY to the owner, but getting downright rude about it. He filed complaints with Federal agencies, then briefed everybody in the office on how to respond to future sales calls from AT&T. Not only did the calls stop, he got a letter from the Feds saying they took action, followed by a letter of apology from AT&T. A rare victory!!
It’s sad to say, but customer service has gone down the toilet for a number of companies. It began with the trend to move CS overseas, and one would think those companies would have learned a lesson from how unhappy customers were with that, but no, they just doubled down on stupid.
My worst and longest experience was with Bank of America (yes, naming names), the world’s worst bank (though KeyBank gives it a run for the honor). Back at a time I was having financial issues, I had a running battle with BofA that literally went on for years. I actually developed a chart on how I would deal with people at the bank. The lower on the totem pole they were, the higher would be my level of verbal abuse. I really didn’t feel badly about this, since these people chose to work for this awful organization, and they were just cogs in the corporate machine and just a step to higher levels of management.
On my chart, the higher the person was on the totem, the more reasonable and calm I’d become, since these people actually had the power to do something and I wanted to elicit their cooperation. But sensible people tended not to last long, and in a couple of weeks we were back with the underlings and the cycle began again.
Finally, I found out the email address for Brian Moynihan, CEO of Bof A, and I’d send him angry late night messages, and by the next morning someone was on the case and resolving it. That would go on for a couple of weeks, then that person would be gone, I’d go back to old Brian, send another angry message, things would get dealt with, until that person disappeared. That cycle went on, literally, to the last day of my dealings with the bank, and in the end, things were resolved in my favor, and in the process the bank had shown itself willing to lose tens of thousands of dollars rather than treat its customers with some semblance of dignity and reason.
The old adage that “the customer is always right” has become as much of an artifact as the Model-T and the dinosaurs. All I can think is that this situation has evolved because so many people are willing to be treated badly and let things go that never should be tolerated. Sad, indeed.
Frank, this video by Shane Killian practically explains why Customer Service was outsourced:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lF1aVdZ6Kks
Granted, it doesn’t make it better, but hard facts are sorely needed.
Shane, that video primarily relates to offshoring manufacturing jobs. It doesn’t relate to offshoring CS. There are a number of reasons companies offshore operations, but I think it would be hard to argue that it was anything other than cost that caused many of them to offshore CS, with the contracts often going to companies who specialize in this area.
Many of the companies that offshored CS are service, not manufacturing, operations — banks and retailers, for instance — and the dissatisfaction with this has been significant and sustained. But as long as people don’t vote with their feet, or in some cases find it very difficult to change suppliers, it makes it all too easy for big companies to give their customers the finger. That many of those companies returned CS onshore, as unresponsive as it often is, indicates customer dissatisfaction did have some impact.
A lot of businesses have a litany of cargo cult “metrics” they assess their drones on, one of which absolutely is not allowing customers to escalate their issue up the chain. It’s part of what I’ve started calling the Cult of Business, which uses naive optimization to drive down costs regardless of the impact this has on their quality of goods/services across the board, or their risk surface to e.g. supply chain shocks. I suspect this results from the majority of businesses being insulated from actual pressure from their customers by virtue of one of three situations:
1. Part of a monopolistic conglomerate that is “too big to fail” and extremely difficult to boycott in any way that can hurt them
2. Baked into some sort of fascistic public-private partnership where a governmental bureaucracy shields them from market forces while they shield said bureaucracy from what meager levers of public power people still might use against it
3. Entirely or mostly funded by “venture capital”, IE someone very rich who in effect can make demands about how the business is run with little to no regard for the people who use its services
I can think of few if any businesses that might have a customer support line that aren’t in one of these situations
Though I encounter this situation regularly, the specific case which triggered me to write this column was Verizon. So, definitely in your model.