I once had a car rental company hang up on me multiple times while trying to resolve multiple screw ups on their end. It took 6 hours to return their wreck to them at the beginning of a trip.
I was polite until the last call. Screaming at the last (innocent) rep about the repeated hang ups was the only way to get them to not hang up and actually address the issue.
I was very tempted to just issue a chargeback and abandon their car in their parking lot.
It’s a good thing I didn’t, since apparently it’s now standard practice for rental car companies to falsely accuse customers of stealing their cars.
The Gus Fring / Malcom X approach of unmovable tranquility in spite of intentional slights and unintentional mixed signals induces far more fear with respect. While the boor is a drain to all in the moment, beware the wrath and fury of the patient.
PS: If this was Hertz, Steve Lehto has turned it into a running meme joke.
If you succeed with the chargeback and are made whole then there's nothing else for you to do. It's up to them to sue you but they won't since it would risk bringing evidence of their bad faith actions in front of a judge and backfire.
A lot bigger PITA to do with a warrant for arrest or from jail.
Just because there is a legal recourse and you're innocent, doesn't mean it's not awful to experience. We need more good-faith actors instead of assuming we'll be made-whole via a painful legal process.
I once shouted into the phone while on a call with a helpline person. They screwed me over with an invoice that looked like a contract extension (domain, hosting), but turned out was an invoice for a separate, second contract for services I don’t need, nor I didn’t order (antivirus for an e-mail, a paid SSL certificate). A pretty blatant phishing-alike fraud. Later I found it’s their MO.
When the person told me that he understands my disappointment but he can’t do anything, and I need to call another number within the company and, ideally, send them a letter via snail mail - I snapped. I shouted that I’m not calling anyone else and it that is their job to fix it, not mine, and I don’t care which department does what in their company, it’s the helpline person to know this and do all the steps necessary to help me get the money back. The guy asked me to calm down and I hung up.
Not my proudest moment, but you know what? The same day I got mail from them with apologies. They nullified the new contract and moved the money to the correct account.
Shame that the corporate greed degrades people to these levels of pity, and it’s not a lesson I’d like to teach my kids, but sadly: in many cases being the nice guy gets you nowhere.
No, you're right. If it helps put pressure it's ok. It will also help the agent you talked to convince their supervisor to help you out. Because they can say you were irate and that does tend to move the needle a bit, even with very bad companies. Nobody likes getting an email from the CEO asking what the hell all this ruckus is about.
I worked as an agent for a while at the start of my career and I got this too. I didn't take it personally. You learn to do that pretty quickly, if not it's not the job for you. After all they're not angry with you but with the company.
Luckily the company I worked for were not bastards so anything we could do to make the customers' lives better was appreciated. But sometimes someone fell through the cracks as does tend to happen. Devices out of warranty, customer dissatisfied etc. It is what it is.
I used to work in callcenter technology. We actually had a feature in one of our systems to make the customers wait even if there were agents directly available. Why? To get them accustomed to long waiting times, discourage them from calling all the time. It is really sick. It was like a fake waiting queue. It could even generate fake messages saying "there's x customers before you".
Of course the companies that wanted to implement this features were the awful ones you shouldn't want to work for or do business with. The ones that abhorred the feature were the ones that cared about customers and employees (usually more EU-centric companies).
As much as I want extremely painful legal retribution for things like this, a good first step would be simply transparency - let customers know the company is deliberately wasting their time and lying to them about it. Not somewhere in small print, either, but, ideally, in the same place and as prominently as their sales pipeline:
"Buy $product! Our customer service has been instructed to lie to you and waste your time!"
I avoid situations like this as if it was the plague but a long time ago I dealt with it for both myself and others who lost the will to deal with it.
This included both commercial and government entities. I never raised my voice, I simply made it abundantly clear that I had a nearly infinite appetite for being litigious in a very public manner if they did not immediately address the issue at hand in good faith. It was effective. In literally every case they did something reasonable and I never heard about it again, even in cases where they had been dragging someone for years.
To be clear, I would have pressed the point if they hadn’t relented. But in every case they did in fact relent. They are obviously making judgments about blowback potential when they do these things, which is terrible policy. Doubly so when governments do it, since they explicitly work for us.
I would love some examples of your approach in those circumstances. I'm sure they're all different but some insight would be helpful, if you don't mind. cheers!
I once had a nightmare series of phone calls with Timer-Warner Cable. I had to cancel because I was making an emergency move out of the apartment and area on the east coast. My call would get dropped on every call; I probably made a dozen calls, explained the situation, waited forever, then transferred or call dropped. At one point a rep transferred me to another call center guy in Chicago, he was totally confused about why I would be transferred to him almost a thousand miles away. Instead of focusing on the emergency for why I was moving out, I was messing around with their horrible service. Swore off ever using them again.
Dropping call is bad, making you wait longer than necessary is also bad. But what's worse is simply having no phone call option at all.
Just like Autodesk[0], you might think that a company that pulls in USD 1.64 billion[1] can afford a decent support line, but that's simply not happening. Even their community forum[2] is stuffed by .... unpaid volunteers. Autodesk employees hardly frequent there.
Comcast has no phone option, unless you are canceling service.
Calling their support line gives you repeated prompts for talking to their chat bot. If you say No enough times, it just texts you a link to the chatbot anyways and disconnects the call. Because fuck you!
I've heard from folks going to their storefront works really well to get issues resolved.
Autodesk is also famous for decommissioning the infrastructure for moving a user's "perpetual" license to new machines.
Anyone who wouldn't take the offer to convert to subscription billing just had their "perpetual" license effectively terminated the next time they moved to a new computer.
Brazil, with all the things it does wrong, has a very good Consumer Law and regulating agencies (for public interest services like utilities, health, etc..)
The regulating agencies have very user friendly digital channels for the population to complain about companies, specially if they use sludge tactics (which are specially forbidden by the consumer law).
My modus operanti is usually try to contact the company once to solve my problem, and if not possible, I'd open a complaint on the regulating agencias. Usually under 5 working days the company would call me with a very knowledgeable agent, a can-do attitude and the problem is solved quickly.
Each complaint got by the regulated companies will count towards substantial fines at the end of the year (usually into millions of USD).
And this is key, because decisions at companies are always driven by impact, by having those fines, the government gives them a very objective way of measuring the benefit of good service.
Readit News
I was polite until the last call. Screaming at the last (innocent) rep about the repeated hang ups was the only way to get them to not hang up and actually address the issue.
I was very tempted to just issue a chargeback and abandon their car in their parking lot.
It’s a good thing I didn’t, since apparently it’s now standard practice for rental car companies to falsely accuse customers of stealing their cars.
https://www.baileyglasser.com/services-rental-car-wrongful-a...
PS: If this was Hertz, Steve Lehto has turned it into a running meme joke.
Just take photos and evidence and sue them? That's gotta be lots of free money for you
Just because there is a legal recourse and you're innocent, doesn't mean it's not awful to experience. We need more good-faith actors instead of assuming we'll be made-whole via a painful legal process.
When the person told me that he understands my disappointment but he can’t do anything, and I need to call another number within the company and, ideally, send them a letter via snail mail - I snapped. I shouted that I’m not calling anyone else and it that is their job to fix it, not mine, and I don’t care which department does what in their company, it’s the helpline person to know this and do all the steps necessary to help me get the money back. The guy asked me to calm down and I hung up.
Not my proudest moment, but you know what? The same day I got mail from them with apologies. They nullified the new contract and moved the money to the correct account.
Shame that the corporate greed degrades people to these levels of pity, and it’s not a lesson I’d like to teach my kids, but sadly: in many cases being the nice guy gets you nowhere.
I worked as an agent for a while at the start of my career and I got this too. I didn't take it personally. You learn to do that pretty quickly, if not it's not the job for you. After all they're not angry with you but with the company.
Luckily the company I worked for were not bastards so anything we could do to make the customers' lives better was appreciated. But sometimes someone fell through the cracks as does tend to happen. Devices out of warranty, customer dissatisfied etc. It is what it is.
Of course the companies that wanted to implement this features were the awful ones you shouldn't want to work for or do business with. The ones that abhorred the feature were the ones that cared about customers and employees (usually more EU-centric companies).
"Buy $product! Our customer service has been instructed to lie to you and waste your time!"
This included both commercial and government entities. I never raised my voice, I simply made it abundantly clear that I had a nearly infinite appetite for being litigious in a very public manner if they did not immediately address the issue at hand in good faith. It was effective. In literally every case they did something reasonable and I never heard about it again, even in cases where they had been dragging someone for years.
To be clear, I would have pressed the point if they hadn’t relented. But in every case they did in fact relent. They are obviously making judgments about blowback potential when they do these things, which is terrible policy. Doubly so when governments do it, since they explicitly work for us.
Deleted Comment
Just like Autodesk[0], you might think that a company that pulls in USD 1.64 billion[1] can afford a decent support line, but that's simply not happening. Even their community forum[2] is stuffed by .... unpaid volunteers. Autodesk employees hardly frequent there.
[0]: https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/autocad-forum/phone-number-to...
[1]: https://investors.autodesk.com/news-releases/news-release-de...
[2]: https://forums.autodesk.com/
Calling their support line gives you repeated prompts for talking to their chat bot. If you say No enough times, it just texts you a link to the chatbot anyways and disconnects the call. Because fuck you!
I've heard from folks going to their storefront works really well to get issues resolved.
Anyone who wouldn't take the offer to convert to subscription billing just had their "perpetual" license effectively terminated the next time they moved to a new computer.
The regulating agencies have very user friendly digital channels for the population to complain about companies, specially if they use sludge tactics (which are specially forbidden by the consumer law).
My modus operanti is usually try to contact the company once to solve my problem, and if not possible, I'd open a complaint on the regulating agencias. Usually under 5 working days the company would call me with a very knowledgeable agent, a can-do attitude and the problem is solved quickly.
Each complaint got by the regulated companies will count towards substantial fines at the end of the year (usually into millions of USD).
And this is key, because decisions at companies are always driven by impact, by having those fines, the government gives them a very objective way of measuring the benefit of good service.