At some point customer service died. Businesses of seem to no longer be interested in dealing with customers. Good customers come in all shapes and sizes, and often don't exactly fit a cookie cutter. It's frustrating to see businesses just cut and run the moment something becomes a problem that needs more than a series of pre-scripted responses to be resolved.
There was a time when the general consensus was that treating customers well would result in greater retention, which, in turn, would ultimately prove to be net positive profit-wise over time.
It seems like that changed somewhere around the turn of the century, whereby businesses started to decide that it was better to cut down on customer service, and in some cases, go so far as to ban customers. The first cases of this I recall reading about had to do with Best Buy, and specifically their policy of banning people from their stores who made a lot of returns.
I'm not really sure how it ultimately maths out - i.e., whether it's long-term optimal to drop troublesome customers or merely short-term optimal, and this was primarily taken from the perspective of retail.
As such, I'm sure the math changes a little for subscription services. However, I also recall my prior employer's support activity followed a power law distribution across its clients, so it wouldn't surprise me if a policy to drop particularly noisy clients is a net savings there as well.
For brick and mortar retail that isn't fast fashion or supermarkets, dropping troublesome customers is generally extremely sensible.
Profit on most goods is low - single digit % typically - and a single return can eliminate the profit margins on a dozen sales. Sometimes cost can be reclaimed from goods providers - i.e. genuinely defective or manufacturer refurbishment programs - and sometimes they can resell the item as new. But if the item has been used, broken by the customer, etc. the loss is significant. It turns out that some people are more honest than others, and some people are directly trying to scam companies.
When one 'dodgy' customer can eliminate the value of 10 'real' sales with every return the maths say to ban people quickly.
A little anecdote - I have a distant relative who, circa 2005, would buy a vacuum cleaner use it, and then return it. He rotated stores (hardware stores, supermarkets, electronic stores) until he gradually got banned from them all. Once that happened he moved house. Not only had he almost certainly spent more in time and fuel than a reasonable vacuum would have cost him (which I will note he could afford); but the cost and waste he has incurred on both individual companies and society at large through that and similar schemes is staggering. I don't know if he's still at it - or alive - but the people he was surrounding himself with all saw such behaviour as reasonable.
There are definitely many customers you should drop, but business are not even that interested in retaining profitable customers. The problem is with the "over time".
Management are rewarded with bonuses and options that focus on the next few years so they are not really interested in how profitable a customer will be over the next ten years, only over the next one or two. Small businesses and family owned businesses are different, but for a big, widely held, professionally managed business the incentives are all short term.
> treating customers well would result in greater retention, which, in turn, would ultimately prove to be net positive profit-wise over time.
may be true in the past, but a business cannot scale up good customer service - it's at best a linear scaling, where each new customer costs the same fixed amount due to needing high touch/people to manage that customer.
With the internet, businesses have found scaling to work better by ensuring your fixed costs stay fixed even if you scaled up customer count - this includes support/call centers etc. Without doing this, the business cannot scale up exponentially.
It did "math out" because these industries heavily lobbied and regulated that starting an alternative is close to impossible. Think about Wise: How many companies out there have the same service? The closest are Revolut and Airwallex. So in a world of 8 billion people and millions of businesses, there are only 3 companies that do the same thing that Wise do. In comparison, there are thousands of banks around the world.
A family member helped start up a call center for UPS back in the 90's, for their shipping software. The problem she was working on was that the average time for a call to be answered was 60 seconds, and they were trying to get it to 45 seconds. They also had formal tiers of agents that could quickly escalate a call to a technical expert if needed. The golden age of call centers I guess.
> It seems like that changed somewhere around the turn of the century, whereby businesses started to decide that it was better to cut down on customer service, and in some cases, go so far as to ban customers.
You missed the first step, which is to burn though tons of cash offering your services below cost, driving all competitors out of business. Then once you've done that, where else are they going to go?
> OP can't even provide proof from the tax office of being at that address
Well, the article says otherwise. I think "The document was rejected because it was a tax invoice, not a bill." is a pretty lame rejection reason.
That being said, I didn't quite get the solution Wise suggested. Don't they already have a lease document for the new office? It looks like the author has omitted some crucial detail.
To counter this, I was using my account for years with no issues, then one day
I've had my Wise account "closed" for no reason other than "breach of terms".
No other insights or discussion and the appeal process basally took months with nothing but an automated response.
I've given up on all these "fintech" companies and am using tradition banks.. at least there is regulations and they can't randomly decide to close your account and remain unresponsive when you require support.
I've been telling my loved ones to stay away from Wise, PayPal and similar services.
I couldn't log on, got the problem escalated, then they got me to create a logged session in their app, and from that they diagnosed the problem was due to larger text on a smaller screen causing their app to crash. I've rarely had technical faults diagnosed and fixed by any company.
Did you read the post? The business had just moved. Was it supposed to wait on the tax office for the next tax statement, which could arrive months later?
I was thinking the same thing recently (dealing with 2 different companies). As soon as the company get some market share - all customer support is just gone. You only get some automated messages in reply, and if you're lucky to speak with someone on the phone - they still just read the answers from some predefined FAQ.
Completely agree. I run a small company and great customer service has been a competitive advantage in what is more or less a red ocean. Just the ability to speak to a human being goes a long way, and if you actually solve their problem, you not only build loyalty but referrals.
With these companies, if it takes more to keep the 10% of customers that will leave because of bad service than providing good service, then bad service will be delivered.
That's what you get for the low cost of entry. When most customers are self-signup (and probably low margin) there's no individual responsible for them.
Good in that you never have to speak to a salesperson, bad in that there will be no-one to take care of you if things go sideways.
On one hand, this makes me incredibly sad. It means that all of us, as consumers, agreed we'd rather save a buck than get acceptable service.
On the other hand, as someone who did customer service in my younger years, 95% of calls were PEBKAC, so it's essentially a giant money drain for things of no real concern to you as a company.
I've often wondered how successful it would be to charge $3 or $5 per call, refunding the money in cases said call was needed.
In principle I agree with the concept of charging for support and refunding if the issue is not at the customer's end. I'd certainly be fine with that myself, even if it cost $50 or so to get a responsible human on the line when there's trouble with a service like banking, payments, or business-critical SaaS providers.
I think Microsoft tried that at one point, but they didn't stick with it for some reason. Maybe it leads to a lot of knock-down, drag-out arguments about whose fault something is.
This was very obviously written with ChatGPT. The structure, emojis, emdashes and contrasting sentences. Surprised nobody is calling it out. IMO save us time and just give us the original short version you wrote to ChatGPT
I am currently employing a consultant for something. It's something I don't want to do myself and they are doing what I need, but it's so painfully obvious they are just vanilla ChatGPTing everything it's almost funny at this point.
Just yesterday, a coworker used "And the best part?" while verbally relating a story.
ChatGPT must have trained on something. Only things I can think of are the many teen angst TV series with spoken "inner monologue" voice over, and narratives from people who are their own main character.
As if shaming people for using ChatGPT to write articles will have any meaningful effect.
It's also quite fatiguing having to read the same complaint over and over when the solution is so simple yet many fail to grasp it.
In the UK I have a single person Ltd. I use a virtual office as my registered address (a standard practice) and my home as my trading address. My UK banks and insurance all list my trading address (knowingly - that is the one they want) and my regular bills are personal, not under the company.
When wise ran a KYC, we had quite the confusing back and forth. The only documents I had which they nearly liked were from HMRC - but they didn't like that they were > 1year old.
In the end I rang HMRC and asked for any paper document they could send me with their logo, my company name, my trading address and my registered address on it... the lovely HMRC rep worked out which real document I could trigger. A complete waste of her time obviously.
It feels like particularly in finance, that startups who disrupt traditional players do so without a full understanding of all the corner cases and none of the regulatory accountability which is why those traditional finance players were so expensive in the first place.
Kinda depends on how you define "accountability" of course, but rejecting paying customers is usually frowned upon in business. You want your KYC processes to be conservative enough not to get fined, but not so conservative that you lose out on potential revenue.
If you're too far off on either side, you either get fined by whatever regulator you fall under, or you get fined by the stock market because your competitors are more profitable.
There are international mechanismis for verifying that countries enforce AML stuff like KYC, but no mechanisms for measuring either how effectice it is nor what it's negative effects are.
Not even corner cases. I worked for a fintech that launched a dda-ish product that had 16 digit account numbers, issued sequentially, with no check digits. At launch there didn't seem to be a CS process for dealing with pretty obvious "customer mistyped account number and sent their money to some else's account." problem.
Back in early 2022, a little after the war started, TransferWise blocked transfer (i.e. donation) to the account run by the National Bank of Ukraine for support of the Ukrainian military.
Looks like it is probably against their acceptable use policy:
1.2.3 Other restricted activities
c. Weaponry, military and semi-military goods and services.
Weapons (including weapons of historic significance), military software, or any other goods or services intended for military use.
Ukraine is well known money laundering machine. Before the conflict started it was a well known fact and many banks didn't want to work with transfers to Ukraine. I am sure TransferWise shared similar risk model.
Ukraine had very strict banking rules for at least a decade. It had much more sense to launder through Cyprus for example or other EU countries like Latvia (when it was still possible) or Hungary if you’re politically connected.
But if you look at the bigger picture, Ukraine has been invaded and occupied by a bigger countries which buys western banks to do it's money laundering through. Now is not the time to be discipling.
The right solution here is to take the telecom tax invoice, edit it in a PDF editor to say Telecom bill, and send it back.
The process is stupid enough that this will work 95% of the time. Is it fraud? No, not really, I'd argue. You're just conforming the document to an arbitrary standard, but all the relevant details are factual, not fraudulent.
I can confirm that this is the exact method recommended in forums where people and businesses that meet adversity from banks on a daily basis (most of the time for completely legitimate businesses, sometimes not) congregate to share advice.
The point is to feed the compliance critters exactly what they want so they can tick their boxes without sticking their necks out.
That was my first thought as I was reading. Of course, I imagine almost every serious business would be extremely uncomfortable doing something like that. On the other hand, if the alternative is getting your account closed anyway, there's not much to lose.
In my country, there is no single document that shows my name and address that is acceptable as a document for address verification in many western fintech applications.
If you're renting, bills will arrive in the name of the owner, even though I personally pay them each month.
We don't really do lease agreements either, except for very rare circumstances.
If you own a property, you could go to the public registry, then translate that, notarize and _maybe_ it will work. But I don't own any property.
We don't even get a PDF for the bills, it's just a HTML table with a few lines of CSS.
So I simply change the owner's name to mine in that table, save as PDF and send that. Never failed.
And at that point, why even have this process at all?
I read this yesterday and thought "only a matter of time for us". We use Wise twice a month and have for a couple of years.
Today I was surprised to find out that matter of time was 12 hours, as I logged in and see:
"We've temporarily blocked your Wise account. We're missing important information from you."
When I click the link, it says: "That address doesn't look right" and shows my business address. That is right.
There's no way to contact nor do anything other than change the address. I of course don't want to change the address, because it's my business address. Lol.
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It seems like that changed somewhere around the turn of the century, whereby businesses started to decide that it was better to cut down on customer service, and in some cases, go so far as to ban customers. The first cases of this I recall reading about had to do with Best Buy, and specifically their policy of banning people from their stores who made a lot of returns.
I'm not really sure how it ultimately maths out - i.e., whether it's long-term optimal to drop troublesome customers or merely short-term optimal, and this was primarily taken from the perspective of retail.
As such, I'm sure the math changes a little for subscription services. However, I also recall my prior employer's support activity followed a power law distribution across its clients, so it wouldn't surprise me if a policy to drop particularly noisy clients is a net savings there as well.
Profit on most goods is low - single digit % typically - and a single return can eliminate the profit margins on a dozen sales. Sometimes cost can be reclaimed from goods providers - i.e. genuinely defective or manufacturer refurbishment programs - and sometimes they can resell the item as new. But if the item has been used, broken by the customer, etc. the loss is significant. It turns out that some people are more honest than others, and some people are directly trying to scam companies.
When one 'dodgy' customer can eliminate the value of 10 'real' sales with every return the maths say to ban people quickly.
A little anecdote - I have a distant relative who, circa 2005, would buy a vacuum cleaner use it, and then return it. He rotated stores (hardware stores, supermarkets, electronic stores) until he gradually got banned from them all. Once that happened he moved house. Not only had he almost certainly spent more in time and fuel than a reasonable vacuum would have cost him (which I will note he could afford); but the cost and waste he has incurred on both individual companies and society at large through that and similar schemes is staggering. I don't know if he's still at it - or alive - but the people he was surrounding himself with all saw such behaviour as reasonable.
There are definitely many customers you should drop, but business are not even that interested in retaining profitable customers. The problem is with the "over time".
Management are rewarded with bonuses and options that focus on the next few years so they are not really interested in how profitable a customer will be over the next ten years, only over the next one or two. Small businesses and family owned businesses are different, but for a big, widely held, professionally managed business the incentives are all short term.
may be true in the past, but a business cannot scale up good customer service - it's at best a linear scaling, where each new customer costs the same fixed amount due to needing high touch/people to manage that customer.
With the internet, businesses have found scaling to work better by ensuring your fixed costs stay fixed even if you scaled up customer count - this includes support/call centers etc. Without doing this, the business cannot scale up exponentially.
You missed the first step, which is to burn though tons of cash offering your services below cost, driving all competitors out of business. Then once you've done that, where else are they going to go?
I'd much prefer to use a company that spends 100% of the time on 80% of customers than one that spends 80% of it's time on 20% of the customers
OP can't even provide proof from the tax office of being at that address, it's an angry rant rather than the whole picture.
Would you go into business with him with nothing but a phone bill as proof?
Well, the article says otherwise. I think "The document was rejected because it was a tax invoice, not a bill." is a pretty lame rejection reason.
That being said, I didn't quite get the solution Wise suggested. Don't they already have a lease document for the new office? It looks like the author has omitted some crucial detail.
No other insights or discussion and the appeal process basally took months with nothing but an automated response.
I've given up on all these "fintech" companies and am using tradition banks.. at least there is regulations and they can't randomly decide to close your account and remain unresponsive when you require support.
I've been telling my loved ones to stay away from Wise, PayPal and similar services.
I couldn't log on, got the problem escalated, then they got me to create a logged session in their app, and from that they diagnosed the problem was due to larger text on a smaller screen causing their app to crash. I've rarely had technical faults diagnosed and fixed by any company.
Wise was very helpful in getting it resolved, and made it clear that if anything else came up, just reply to the e-mail anytime.
At some point enforcement died. It used to be that locking someone out of their money would wind up with people in jail.
Now, it's not just a cost of doing business but also viewed as a positive by state actors.
Good in that you never have to speak to a salesperson, bad in that there will be no-one to take care of you if things go sideways.
On the other hand, as someone who did customer service in my younger years, 95% of calls were PEBKAC, so it's essentially a giant money drain for things of no real concern to you as a company.
I've often wondered how successful it would be to charge $3 or $5 per call, refunding the money in cases said call was needed.
I think Microsoft tried that at one point, but they didn't stick with it for some reason. Maybe it leads to a lot of knock-down, drag-out arguments about whose fault something is.
I am currently employing a consultant for something. It's something I don't want to do myself and they are doing what I need, but it's so painfully obvious they are just vanilla ChatGPTing everything it's almost funny at this point.
ChatGPT must have trained on something. Only things I can think of are the many teen angst TV series with spoken "inner monologue" voice over, and narratives from people who are their own main character.
Dead Comment
When wise ran a KYC, we had quite the confusing back and forth. The only documents I had which they nearly liked were from HMRC - but they didn't like that they were > 1year old.
In the end I rang HMRC and asked for any paper document they could send me with their logo, my company name, my trading address and my registered address on it... the lovely HMRC rep worked out which real document I could trigger. A complete waste of her time obviously.
If you're too far off on either side, you either get fined by whatever regulator you fall under, or you get fined by the stock market because your competitors are more profitable.
I have and never will forgive them for this.
1.2.3 Other restricted activities c. Weaponry, military and semi-military goods and services. Weapons (including weapons of historic significance), military software, or any other goods or services intended for military use.
Ukraine is well known money laundering machine. Before the conflict started it was a well known fact and many banks didn't want to work with transfers to Ukraine. I am sure TransferWise shared similar risk model.
Can you provide any sources for this?
Ukraine had very strict banking rules for at least a decade. It had much more sense to launder through Cyprus for example or other EU countries like Latvia (when it was still possible) or Hungary if you’re politically connected.
But if you look at the bigger picture, Ukraine has been invaded and occupied by a bigger countries which buys western banks to do it's money laundering through. Now is not the time to be discipling.
Justice is more than just following laws.
Transfers to other accounts were still possible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yscaDkzHqek
Deleted Comment
Also. Well done wise.com. Only having customers who use Wordpress means no vitality on people posting hate for you.
The process is stupid enough that this will work 95% of the time. Is it fraud? No, not really, I'd argue. You're just conforming the document to an arbitrary standard, but all the relevant details are factual, not fraudulent.
The point is to feed the compliance critters exactly what they want so they can tick their boxes without sticking their necks out.
If you're renting, bills will arrive in the name of the owner, even though I personally pay them each month.
We don't really do lease agreements either, except for very rare circumstances.
If you own a property, you could go to the public registry, then translate that, notarize and _maybe_ it will work. But I don't own any property.
We don't even get a PDF for the bills, it's just a HTML table with a few lines of CSS.
So I simply change the owner's name to mine in that table, save as PDF and send that. Never failed.
And at that point, why even have this process at all?
Today I was surprised to find out that matter of time was 12 hours, as I logged in and see:
"We've temporarily blocked your Wise account. We're missing important information from you."
When I click the link, it says: "That address doesn't look right" and shows my business address. That is right.
There's no way to contact nor do anything other than change the address. I of course don't want to change the address, because it's my business address. Lol.