I won't deny many companies are playing this game of skimping as much as they can get away with, and I despise this practice. There's also the other side of the fence though: customers who are just a resource drain.
I've recently been involved in some customer support efforts, and there are customers who are just unreasonable. They'll demand to have their cake, eat it too, and even get a new one. For the nuisance that a completely made up problem caused them. A problem that wouldn't even be your fault if it had been real.
They are a vast minority, but they spoil it for everyone. They consume your time and especially your team's morale. There is only so much bullshit a support agent can take before getting fed up with it and degrading their service to subsequent customers.
Now the organization has to figure out a way to detect those customers early enough to prevent them from screwing up everything for everyone. But false positives are very expensive: get one wrong and it becomes a PR nightmare.
Furthermore, if you try to give the best possible support, you must empower your agents to act. They can now screw up and even get your company in legal trouble. Good training reduces this risk, but humans making calls means errors will be made eventually.
In the end, reducing support to the bare minimum possible appears a reasonable option for many companies: it is the easiest to implement, it reduces legal/PR risks, and it has a very measurable and consistent effect (how many people stop buying/using your service after failing to get support). If that number is low enough, it just doesn't make economical sense to try to provide good support, which is a very hard endeavor for the reasons mentioned above.
It's also possible, though, that companies are inadvertently training customers to be "bad customers" with the games they play around retention.
Consider the example of the AT&T customer in the article. The agent said there was "nothing she could do" until right up to the moment when the customer was switching. It's now common knowledge that this is basically the best way to get a deal, so many people skip the whole "Can you please give me a discount?" and instead go straight to the combative "Just close my account" first, as that's often the only way to get a deal.
This exact thing happened to me yesterday. Was trying to get Verizon to reverse a recent $20 rate increase due to a "customer loyalty discount" that automatically got removed.
I spent 47 minutes going around in circles with the rep, politely explaining that I did not wish to change my plan, or even get my bill lowered to the current promo rates which are about $30 less than what I'm paying for the exact same service. She would not budge, and offered me all kinds of crappy options such as entering into a new 2-year lock in contract, or removing ALL HD channels from my TV lineup.
Finally I threw in the towel and said, "I guess I just have to cancel this, I'm sorry". She immediately said, "Wait, let me see... hmm, Ok yes there does seem to be an offer here where I can extend your loyalty discount for another year. I'll go ahead and do that." Magic. Just like that.
I asked her why we had to play an hour long cat-and-mouse game to get this done. She had no explanation.
in some parts of the middle-east its expected you haggle to get a deal. if you don't , you arent showing respect and society expects you get screwed with a ridiculously high price.
That's funny, I regularly say please give me a discount or credit, politely, in person, emails or on phone. For the last four times I can remember, the CS rep was always nice and on top of that, does it.
> There's also the other side of the fence though: customers who are just a resource drain.
Sweet Jesus, this. At one of my older software support jobs, we had a Law of Inverse Size-to-Attention: the guys with hundreds of employees who paid us hundreds of thousands of dollars in support rarely called us (or if they did, they had actually competent IT staff we could work with), while the Mom-and-Pop shops that paid for the bare minimum licensing and support were the ones that called us every day and repeatedly refused to RTFM. Some would balk at the idea of paying anything at all, as though we should be so honored that Bob's Shack in Bumf*ck, ID decided to use our software that we should wave all associated costs.
> the guys with hundreds of employees who paid us hundreds of thousands of dollars in support rarely called us (or if they did, they had actually competent IT staff we could work with)
These are all related.
Customers who are successful businesses tend to have money, and competent employees who solve many of the problems themselves. Customers who are not successful tend not to have money and less competent employees.
This is why so many people recommend startups and contractors to raise their prices - not only do you get paid more, but also you filter out less competent customers.
> In the end, reducing support to the bare minimum possible appears a reasonable option for many companies: it is the easiest to implement, it reduces legal/PR risks, and it has a very measurable and consistent effect (how many people stop buying/using your service after failing to get support).
I agree that this is the best short interest for corporations. And that is why it is so important laws to protect consumers.
Corporations act in completely selfish economic interest. Mandatory customer support and hefty fines and regular inspections are the only protection for consumers. Also, it creates a fair environment where having good customer support is not an extra cost because of all companies having to provide it.
Corporations have a social responsibility that needs to be enforced. Corporations are going to optimize their extractive capacity until we humans are just reduced to production machines that survive another day to feed corporations profits. Our society goal should be human wellbeing, not corporate profits.
> "...it just doesn't make economical sense to try to provide good support, which is a very hard endeavor for the reasons mentioned above."
it's economically rational but it's also a classic externality. the cost of poor service is externalized onto customers not only as direct costs in time and money but also indirectly as human anger and violence, which trickles out socioeconomically as general incivility (e.g., road rage).
i'm all for strengthening the legal equality of the individual so that corporations can't shirk off such externalities as simply a cost of doing business, as you suggest.
most "bad" customers are reacting to unfairness and injustice, not trying to swindle the company. treat customers fairly, even erring on their side, rather than treating them like moneybags for the squeezing, and you'll find good customer service is fast and easy (if tricky to master).
I worked for a massively incompetent electronics conglomerate at one point. They decided to change all of our phone numbers for some reason. My number became a former support number, and if you had an old enough product and looked in the manual for our support number, I might have gotten that call.
Most of the time I just gave the callers the correct number, but if it was a product I had worked on I would try to answer their questions...
Some dumb f* called up once and claimed he had taken the batteries that came with a product of ours he bought, put them in his Apple keyboard, and they had leaked, ruining his keyboard. He was adamant he was owed a keyboard.
I tried explaining politely that batteries leak from being over-discharged... But he wasn't having any of it. I eventually handed him off to customer service, who I assume told him to pound sand.
What most likely happened wasn't that they were overcharged, but that they dried out and expanded. He probably just needed to clean his terminals and put in fresh batteries. That doesn't just happen overnight. Either that or he tried to recharge non rechargable batteries.
Back in the early 2000s, I could call up my internet provider (Bellsouth) and talk to an actual, technically trained person who could intelligently diagnose and fix problems with my service. Now, I get someone who parrots back my problem descriptions without understanding them, insists I perform useless steps that could never help, then shrugs and tells me a technician has to come to my house. That's if I can get through the phone system that forces me to use voice commands.
Never, ever sign up for residential Internet service. Always sign up for business service. You'll be amazed at how much better this type of situation plays out, for both you and the support rep.
I purchased a utility sink/cabinet combo from Home Depot last year for $200. The same product is sold by Lowes and all over the Internet in various styles. The OEM is this company called Conglom, but Home Depot markets all its plumbing products as "Glacier Bay" and has its own support system for those products.
So anyway, I install the sink and the faucet has a small leak. So I call the Glacier Bay number expecting terrible service. The call is answered immediately. A lady takes my information and says she'll contact the OEM and get a new part sent to me and puts me on hold. She picks back up a minute or two later to say the OEM is closed for the day but she'll contact them the next day. I think that's the end of it, but then I get a call from her the next day to confirm she's reached the OEM and the replacement part is on the way.
HD can't make but a few dollars if anything on this product.
Aside, Moen also provides insanely good customer service. And I've heard Delta faucets does too. Maybe it's a plumbing thing. :-)
I've had a similar extremely amazing experience. I do a lot with 3d printing, and I buy Misumi extrusions.
During a large format printer I built, their website claimed that the 90deg brackets werent guaranteed to be 90deg ?! So, I called them, and got the secretary. I was expecting to be shoved off. She looked at the website where I indicated, and asked me to wait a few moments.
About 45 seconds go by, and I'm talking with a Japanese engineer who's fluent in English who runs the line ! He looks at the design schematic and the website, and says it had to do with a data import that didnt convert the tolerance data (90deg +- .0021) correctly, and instead put a boilerplate 'NOTANUMBER' result.
He then sent me the design schematic for all incident angles.
It was absolutely amazing - that I talked with the engineer responsible for that part in less than a minute.
> I've had a similar extremely amazing experience. I do a lot with 3d printing, and I buy Misumi extrusions.
Excellent products and customer service seems to also be a very Japanese thing.
We used to order ring clamps from a manufacturer, and they would always come back polished absolutely perfectly. We didn't order it that way, and we told them several times that they were wasting money doing that. It didn't matter; there was an old Japanese engineer running that line and he was going to be consigned to the fires of hell before a part with a substandard finish would leave his line.
Then he passed away. And even the tolerance control (which is vitally important) went to shit. It seems that attention to detail is all or nothing.
I think this sort of support has to be good because your alternative is to return it to the store, and this costs them way more.
In the past few years, I’ve noticed a proliferation of material included in the box that attempts to preempt this. “Don’t return this to the store! Call us at 1-800-WHAT-EVER for help.”
Where the customer’s remedy isn’t so easy and costly for the business, it’s much more hit or miss.
An incentive may be process improvement, combined with competitive products.
Faulty items returned to the store may or may not be returned to the manufacturer. In trying to suss out what went wrong, having the actual failed hardware in hand is useful.
And certain sectors (especially manufacturing) face numerous other competitors. A few bad reviews can have a large impact on purchases.
The Lego Group is also insanely good about this sort of thing.
If you tell them you're missing parts from a product, it'll ship. It happened to me once. The set was missing an entire bag. They shipped one out. No proof of purchase required.
If you tell them you're missing a manual or it got destroyed. They'll ship one out.
A hiccup on their site caused me to miss out on a promotional item. And when I realized, the promotion was over. They sent me one. Just my word was enough.
I just had the same magical experience, but with char broil. Frustrated that the assembled grill I'd brought home was not only showing some rust, but was missing grate, I sent them a short note via web form. They called me 2 days later to confirm they were going to mail me a new grate, gave me cleaning tips, and offered to ship me a whole new one if I couldn't get it cleaned up. I was really blown away, and fully expected them to tell me to take it up with the store and sod off.
My experience has been that customer support numbers are great at conventional issues. Anything like an address change, return under warranty, or similar will probably go fine.
The issue with that is, I'll rarely call them for such a problem. Companies tend to let you fill out some form on their website for such an issue these days.
Sometimes calling with an oddball problem goes okay because you hit an excellent person on the other end, but often they're clueless, and the whole thing becomes a struggle.
This is, I suspect, made worse by call centers having metrics around call time. They want to get rid of you quickly and move to the next call.
If I was writing this story i'd scour social media replies to the major telco's and then get in touch with people.
Likely picked telco's since they rank so low on customer satisfaction, ditto with banks
Large part of being a good reporter and getting the story right is networking and finding where the story leads you
This is certainly right in this case - if you count the sources in the story you'll see the reporter spoke to at least 9 people and cited a few reports and previous reporting
edit: it's also possible the reporter didn't fly to IL - she may have done the interview over the phone/video and the editor sent in a local freelance or bureau photographer
- A very large online footprint associated vaguely with the story.
- Knew the reporter socially.
- Knew the reporter through previous contacts. (Emailing the publication can do this.)
- Chaining through other contacts -- "oh, you should talk to ...".
That includes a decade or three's experience. Today with social media the task is much easier.
Various public filings (court records, consumer complaints to gov't offices, to watchdog groups) can also trigger journalist follow-ups, depending on the case.
The reporter very likely talked to 10x the people cited in the article -- one reason good journalism is hard. As with high-quality video and audio production, it's what's left out that makes what's left in much better.
Not quite the same, but there are networks of people that reporters can reach out to when they want a quote or a piece for a story. They send out prompts and people with relevant experience can reply: https://www.helpareporter.com/
A lot of customers treat customer service like a psychological outlet, someone who is paid to take their abuse. I have seen and heard some pretty horrible situations of a customer who is clearly taking out their own emotional problems on a poor CS rep time and time again. I don't know many CS people who haven't ended up in tears at work at least once. It's a psychologically hazardous job, and it gets no fanfare.
It doesn't help that the relationship between customers and businesses is so often just directly antagonistic, customer service isn't something that businesses want to do, it's something they have to do. CS people end up being the meat shield between the customer who knows they are being exploited or manipulated and the people in the company making decisions for little bits of profit or to cut costs here and there and never directly has to face repercussions for all the shortcuts they take just to bolster their personal KPIs. There's a reason people hate working CS and retail; it can be legitimately traumatic, and they often have to find themselves being the friendly face pasted over an uncaring machine.
For all the hate that open offices get, I appreciate the fact that my desk is within earshot of CS taking phone calls. As a developer it's a hell of a lot easier to see what the downstream effects of the things you do and the changes you make are when you can hear the repercussions of them directly. It also definitely motivates me to try to find ways I can ease the burden on them. These stresses ought to be distributed as equally among a corporation as possible.
I've worked for a couple of companies where engineers shadowed the people on the phones (both sales and support) periodically. It can definitely help build empathy for the users of internal tools and the end customers, but it doesn't do much if the rest of the company doesn't prioritize fixing the problems found by those shadowing.
Lots of potential to undermine this. Start every customer service interaction with “I’m going to cancel my service”. Make yourself sound angry but don’t attack the representative directly of course (don’t be an asshole). Say you’re angry, definitely. Sense of urgency, and other social engineering techniques.
Companies can’t stop this that easily. If they do, they basically have to try to call bullshit and confront them. Any system that counters this will end up harming normal customers who are generally angry.
Which is basically what everyone has been doing with cable companies for years to get lower bills, until recently when they started calling everyone’s bluff. If you try to cancel now, they’ll mostly just say “fine” and send you right through the process.
YMMV. My method has been working well with Comcast. When it's renewal time, I call and ask for the retention department immediately (say "cancel" to the interactive voice response system). When the agent comes on the line, I say that my rate is going up and I just want to keep the same rate and same service. No threatening, no anger, no actual statement that I want to cancel. Just, "I want to keep the same service and the same rate. Can we do that?" It has worked for about five years so far. I switched to Comcast from Verizon DSL. With Vz, there was no negotiation, and besides, their service was actually terrible and I did want to cancel.
Which is why. Some friends rotate accounts by using their name, their partner’s name, and even their kid’s name in an annual dance of getting the new user introductory rates.
The last time I got counterfeit goods from Scamazon (was not on prime), I called them up and they gave me a line about how I'd have to ship it back on my dime and I might get a refund.
Once I started yelling, the situation drastically changed and suddenly they were offering free shipment. I demanded a ship box delivered, since I shouldn't have to go out of my way for counterfeits. More yelling and...
And they sent a ship box to my house, and included 3 months of prime.
Literally, the more I abused someone on behalf of shitty corporate policy, the more I got.
The technology isn’t why. Idiot businesspeople focused on the short term who think it’s good business to piss off their customers as long as they don’t switch to a competitor is why.
That's not what it is either. It's just the effects of monopolies. If the telecom giants had to worry about real competition, they'd actually need to make customers happy to stay competitive.
The only way I was able to escape Comcast's dogshit service was by moving to a different house.
Completely agree, looks like that's where evolution is sadly bringing us.
Reminds me of a totally different example, recently saw a documentary on the history of Whistler Blackcomb (ski resort in BC). They used to be two different resorts geographically right next to each others. While they were competing, they were innovating, one playing on the cool side, crafting runs to be perfect for snowboarding. The other was playing on the family / classy side, distributing hot chocolate in the lineups. Prices were kept down. Then they merged into one resort, which apart from the purely skiing part is undifferentiable from others. Prices went up. The resort got bought out by Vale 3y ago, prices skirocketed (50% increase on the daily tickets).
Point is, competition was keeping two small businesses at bay, caring at least 2fks for their satisfaction cause if they weren't, they would just climb the south mountain rather than the north. Now if you want actual competition you need to drive 6h to the east, so who cares. Plus you now need to extract administration cost for the larger entity and dividends for the larger number of shareholders that have supported the investment.
Any consolidation that happens makes me sad, cause it's never good for you as a customer.
Are they idiots though? They know the customer has no choice so they leverage this into offering the absolute worst service they can offer and still make money. On the other hand their lobby groups make sure this remains the status quo.
This isn't a happy accident for those "idiot businesspeople", it's a carefully thought out business plan.
Even if you can ride the fine line to keep frustrated customers, they’ll tell friends, family, and strangers about how much you suck and you’ll have a harder time acquiring new customers.
Instead of solving their customers' problems immediately, they have a computer analyze the tone of your voice and decide whether or not you really need to be helped. We're one step closer to life being a "simulation" where very little that is real matters. Your position as a customer and customer service's position as an agent are irrelevant, what matters is whether or not the computer has decided you are worth helping (until then, the agent "cannot" help you).
I think the worst part is, people will adapt and start to treat customer service with more anger, as they'll learn it solves their problems more frequently. Some of them will take this behavior out into meatspace instead of just doing it over the phone. Of course, people already do this, but even more people will do it as a result of this sort of treatment.
Customer service got so much better over the years it's almost unbelievable that we accepted where we came from. It used to be that companies needed to be shamed on national TV before they would even consider to change their attitudes to paying customers.
In the 21st century so many companies really rely on good ratings by consumers they go out of their way to get a negative review, or to compensate you to take one away if you do post one.
Maybe the companies stuck in the 20th century or the ones that think they'll just hold on to their monopoly forever still believe they'll get away with it but those are businesses most likely to be disrupted in the next 10-20 years.
Readit News
I've recently been involved in some customer support efforts, and there are customers who are just unreasonable. They'll demand to have their cake, eat it too, and even get a new one. For the nuisance that a completely made up problem caused them. A problem that wouldn't even be your fault if it had been real.
They are a vast minority, but they spoil it for everyone. They consume your time and especially your team's morale. There is only so much bullshit a support agent can take before getting fed up with it and degrading their service to subsequent customers.
Now the organization has to figure out a way to detect those customers early enough to prevent them from screwing up everything for everyone. But false positives are very expensive: get one wrong and it becomes a PR nightmare.
Furthermore, if you try to give the best possible support, you must empower your agents to act. They can now screw up and even get your company in legal trouble. Good training reduces this risk, but humans making calls means errors will be made eventually.
In the end, reducing support to the bare minimum possible appears a reasonable option for many companies: it is the easiest to implement, it reduces legal/PR risks, and it has a very measurable and consistent effect (how many people stop buying/using your service after failing to get support). If that number is low enough, it just doesn't make economical sense to try to provide good support, which is a very hard endeavor for the reasons mentioned above.
Consider the example of the AT&T customer in the article. The agent said there was "nothing she could do" until right up to the moment when the customer was switching. It's now common knowledge that this is basically the best way to get a deal, so many people skip the whole "Can you please give me a discount?" and instead go straight to the combative "Just close my account" first, as that's often the only way to get a deal.
I spent 47 minutes going around in circles with the rep, politely explaining that I did not wish to change my plan, or even get my bill lowered to the current promo rates which are about $30 less than what I'm paying for the exact same service. She would not budge, and offered me all kinds of crappy options such as entering into a new 2-year lock in contract, or removing ALL HD channels from my TV lineup. Finally I threw in the towel and said, "I guess I just have to cancel this, I'm sorry". She immediately said, "Wait, let me see... hmm, Ok yes there does seem to be an offer here where I can extend your loyalty discount for another year. I'll go ahead and do that." Magic. Just like that.
I asked her why we had to play an hour long cat-and-mouse game to get this done. She had no explanation.
Sweet Jesus, this. At one of my older software support jobs, we had a Law of Inverse Size-to-Attention: the guys with hundreds of employees who paid us hundreds of thousands of dollars in support rarely called us (or if they did, they had actually competent IT staff we could work with), while the Mom-and-Pop shops that paid for the bare minimum licensing and support were the ones that called us every day and repeatedly refused to RTFM. Some would balk at the idea of paying anything at all, as though we should be so honored that Bob's Shack in Bumf*ck, ID decided to use our software that we should wave all associated costs.
These are all related.
Customers who are successful businesses tend to have money, and competent employees who solve many of the problems themselves. Customers who are not successful tend not to have money and less competent employees.
This is why so many people recommend startups and contractors to raise their prices - not only do you get paid more, but also you filter out less competent customers.
I agree that this is the best short interest for corporations. And that is why it is so important laws to protect consumers.
"Salmonella sickens 1.2 million Americans every year and causes 450 deaths ... But there’s a loophole when it comes to salmonella: It isn’t on that prohibited list of adulterants." https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/10/4/17936714/be...
Corporations act in completely selfish economic interest. Mandatory customer support and hefty fines and regular inspections are the only protection for consumers. Also, it creates a fair environment where having good customer support is not an extra cost because of all companies having to provide it.
Corporations have a social responsibility that needs to be enforced. Corporations are going to optimize their extractive capacity until we humans are just reduced to production machines that survive another day to feed corporations profits. Our society goal should be human wellbeing, not corporate profits.
it's economically rational but it's also a classic externality. the cost of poor service is externalized onto customers not only as direct costs in time and money but also indirectly as human anger and violence, which trickles out socioeconomically as general incivility (e.g., road rage).
i'm all for strengthening the legal equality of the individual so that corporations can't shirk off such externalities as simply a cost of doing business, as you suggest.
most "bad" customers are reacting to unfairness and injustice, not trying to swindle the company. treat customers fairly, even erring on their side, rather than treating them like moneybags for the squeezing, and you'll find good customer service is fast and easy (if tricky to master).
Most of the time I just gave the callers the correct number, but if it was a product I had worked on I would try to answer their questions...
Some dumb f* called up once and claimed he had taken the batteries that came with a product of ours he bought, put them in his Apple keyboard, and they had leaked, ruining his keyboard. He was adamant he was owed a keyboard.
I tried explaining politely that batteries leak from being over-discharged... But he wasn't having any of it. I eventually handed him off to customer service, who I assume told him to pound sand.
And if you're finding that selling licenses and support bundled doesn't work, or that unlimited support doesn't work, start metering support.
Mom'n'pop and enterprise markets are hugely different. Sounds as if a fair bit of the problem you're encountering is trying to map them the same.
Then there's the alternative of providing a subsidy to transfer those customers to your competitors....
I purchased a utility sink/cabinet combo from Home Depot last year for $200. The same product is sold by Lowes and all over the Internet in various styles. The OEM is this company called Conglom, but Home Depot markets all its plumbing products as "Glacier Bay" and has its own support system for those products.
So anyway, I install the sink and the faucet has a small leak. So I call the Glacier Bay number expecting terrible service. The call is answered immediately. A lady takes my information and says she'll contact the OEM and get a new part sent to me and puts me on hold. She picks back up a minute or two later to say the OEM is closed for the day but she'll contact them the next day. I think that's the end of it, but then I get a call from her the next day to confirm she's reached the OEM and the replacement part is on the way.
HD can't make but a few dollars if anything on this product.
Aside, Moen also provides insanely good customer service. And I've heard Delta faucets does too. Maybe it's a plumbing thing. :-)
During a large format printer I built, their website claimed that the 90deg brackets werent guaranteed to be 90deg ?! So, I called them, and got the secretary. I was expecting to be shoved off. She looked at the website where I indicated, and asked me to wait a few moments.
About 45 seconds go by, and I'm talking with a Japanese engineer who's fluent in English who runs the line ! He looks at the design schematic and the website, and says it had to do with a data import that didnt convert the tolerance data (90deg +- .0021) correctly, and instead put a boilerplate 'NOTANUMBER' result.
He then sent me the design schematic for all incident angles.
It was absolutely amazing - that I talked with the engineer responsible for that part in less than a minute.
So.. I keep buying from Misumi. :)
Excellent products and customer service seems to also be a very Japanese thing.
We used to order ring clamps from a manufacturer, and they would always come back polished absolutely perfectly. We didn't order it that way, and we told them several times that they were wasting money doing that. It didn't matter; there was an old Japanese engineer running that line and he was going to be consigned to the fires of hell before a part with a substandard finish would leave his line.
Then he passed away. And even the tolerance control (which is vitally important) went to shit. It seems that attention to detail is all or nothing.
In the past few years, I’ve noticed a proliferation of material included in the box that attempts to preempt this. “Don’t return this to the store! Call us at 1-800-WHAT-EVER for help.”
Where the customer’s remedy isn’t so easy and costly for the business, it’s much more hit or miss.
Faulty items returned to the store may or may not be returned to the manufacturer. In trying to suss out what went wrong, having the actual failed hardware in hand is useful.
And certain sectors (especially manufacturing) face numerous other competitors. A few bad reviews can have a large impact on purchases.
If you tell them you're missing parts from a product, it'll ship. It happened to me once. The set was missing an entire bag. They shipped one out. No proof of purchase required.
If you tell them you're missing a manual or it got destroyed. They'll ship one out.
A hiccup on their site caused me to miss out on a promotional item. And when I realized, the promotion was over. They sent me one. Just my word was enough.
Sometimes they’ll insist you go to the store, but if you push them, they’ll mail it out.
But it’s obvious their powers that be are playing the long game, not the next quarter game.
I wonder if Public Incs like AT&T has a dial where they decrease or increase their level of support based on how that quarter is doing.
Gotta best the analysts’ estimates by a penny or else.
The issue with that is, I'll rarely call them for such a problem. Companies tend to let you fill out some form on their website for such an issue these days.
Sometimes calling with an oddball problem goes okay because you hit an excellent person on the other end, but often they're clueless, and the whole thing becomes a struggle.
This is, I suspect, made worse by call centers having metrics around call time. They want to get rid of you quickly and move to the next call.
How do newspapers find anecdotal stories like this? I mean this could have been anyone, anywhere - we all have these sorts of frustrating stories.
Is there a sort of marketplace or broker who has a list of on-demand anecdotes?
I just can’t imagine it’s worth it for WSJ to fly a reporter halfway across the country to get a head shot and a one paragraph statement.
Likely picked telco's since they rank so low on customer satisfaction, ditto with banks
Large part of being a good reporter and getting the story right is networking and finding where the story leads you
This is certainly right in this case - if you count the sources in the story you'll see the reporter spoke to at least 9 people and cited a few reports and previous reporting
edit: it's also possible the reporter didn't fly to IL - she may have done the interview over the phone/video and the editor sent in a local freelance or bureau photographer
- A very large online footprint associated vaguely with the story.
- Knew the reporter socially.
- Knew the reporter through previous contacts. (Emailing the publication can do this.)
- Chaining through other contacts -- "oh, you should talk to ...".
That includes a decade or three's experience. Today with social media the task is much easier.
Various public filings (court records, consumer complaints to gov't offices, to watchdog groups) can also trigger journalist follow-ups, depending on the case.
The reporter very likely talked to 10x the people cited in the article -- one reason good journalism is hard. As with high-quality video and audio production, it's what's left out that makes what's left in much better.
"Help A Reporter Out (HARO): Your PR Agency's Worst Nightmare" https://www.forbes.com/sites/zalmiduchman/2015/11/27/haro/
"Help a Reporter Out (HARO): Ultimate Guide 2019" https://fitsmallbusiness.com/help-a-reporter-out-haro/
It doesn't help that the relationship between customers and businesses is so often just directly antagonistic, customer service isn't something that businesses want to do, it's something they have to do. CS people end up being the meat shield between the customer who knows they are being exploited or manipulated and the people in the company making decisions for little bits of profit or to cut costs here and there and never directly has to face repercussions for all the shortcuts they take just to bolster their personal KPIs. There's a reason people hate working CS and retail; it can be legitimately traumatic, and they often have to find themselves being the friendly face pasted over an uncaring machine.
For all the hate that open offices get, I appreciate the fact that my desk is within earshot of CS taking phone calls. As a developer it's a hell of a lot easier to see what the downstream effects of the things you do and the changes you make are when you can hear the repercussions of them directly. It also definitely motivates me to try to find ways I can ease the burden on them. These stresses ought to be distributed as equally among a corporation as possible.
I think the relationship is actually between the company, which abuses its customers, and the CSRs, which are hired as a meat shield.
Companies can’t stop this that easily. If they do, they basically have to try to call bullshit and confront them. Any system that counters this will end up harming normal customers who are generally angry.
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Once I started yelling, the situation drastically changed and suddenly they were offering free shipment. I demanded a ship box delivered, since I shouldn't have to go out of my way for counterfeits. More yelling and...
And they sent a ship box to my house, and included 3 months of prime.
Literally, the more I abused someone on behalf of shitty corporate policy, the more I got.
The only way I was able to escape Comcast's dogshit service was by moving to a different house.
Reminds me of a totally different example, recently saw a documentary on the history of Whistler Blackcomb (ski resort in BC). They used to be two different resorts geographically right next to each others. While they were competing, they were innovating, one playing on the cool side, crafting runs to be perfect for snowboarding. The other was playing on the family / classy side, distributing hot chocolate in the lineups. Prices were kept down. Then they merged into one resort, which apart from the purely skiing part is undifferentiable from others. Prices went up. The resort got bought out by Vale 3y ago, prices skirocketed (50% increase on the daily tickets).
Point is, competition was keeping two small businesses at bay, caring at least 2fks for their satisfaction cause if they weren't, they would just climb the south mountain rather than the north. Now if you want actual competition you need to drive 6h to the east, so who cares. Plus you now need to extract administration cost for the larger entity and dividends for the larger number of shareholders that have supported the investment.
Any consolidation that happens makes me sad, cause it's never good for you as a customer.
This isn't a happy accident for those "idiot businesspeople", it's a carefully thought out business plan.
I think the worst part is, people will adapt and start to treat customer service with more anger, as they'll learn it solves their problems more frequently. Some of them will take this behavior out into meatspace instead of just doing it over the phone. Of course, people already do this, but even more people will do it as a result of this sort of treatment.
In the 21st century so many companies really rely on good ratings by consumers they go out of their way to get a negative review, or to compensate you to take one away if you do post one.
Maybe the companies stuck in the 20th century or the ones that think they'll just hold on to their monopoly forever still believe they'll get away with it but those are businesses most likely to be disrupted in the next 10-20 years.