6 ms·

"Reaching out via social" seems to be the new "can I speak to a supervisor". True story - a month ago my credit card bill showed a mysterious $100 charge from

by fenomas 10y ago

"Reaching out via social" seems to be the new "can I speak to a supervisor". True story - a month ago my credit card bill showed a mysterious $100 charge from Amazon. Phone support found the charge but couldn't figure out why it had been made, and eventually asked me to call my bank and dispute it(!!). That sounded like crazy talk, but rather than arguing I just said thanks and tweeted @amazon. Their social people referred me to someone who wound up figuring out how to cancel the charge.

zaroth 10y ago
Disputing the charge is the right thing to do in any case. Your CC company should make it very easy to login and mark the charge as problematic. They want to know if bad charges are coming in from the vendor, and this is the best way to track it. I personally don't think twice about disputing fraudulent or even mistaken charges. I can see how you might want to reserve this tool as an all-else-fails, but really CC companies should be appreciative of people using the tool because it gives them useful signals. Much better than the many many others who are missing the charge and paying for it by mistake.
- eridius 10y ago
  Disputing a charge just because you don't immediately know what it is, is not a good idea. At least, not if you want to continue doing business with the vendor that made the charge. Companies tend to take a dim view of people issuing chargebacks.
  - zaroth 10y ago
    That's an interesting perspective. I take a dim view of companies charging my card incorrectly. Particularly Amazon since they submit many separate charges for items within a a single order, making it virtually impossible to verify the charges. I believe it is against the merchant agreement to withhold service after a valid charge-back. That would be a major and unwarranted retaliation, which you could probably sue and win a large class action if this is really happening. I will say, I should have made more clear, the first step in a dispute will be to contact the merchant. They will have a fixed number of days to reply and correct the problem.
    - ccrush 10y ago
      There was a somewhat recent case of someone having their amazon account with all their media they purchased licenses to view via their Amazon account taken away from them permanently for issuing a charge back due to some disputed activity on their account. So, before you go around issuing charge backs, you should think of the consequences of disputing your account status with that merchant. You may end up losing access to ALL your Steam games just because some kid cracked your password and purchased a $1 game with your account. This is the danger of having an account on these digital distribution sites everyone seems to be so fond of. Sure, you can download your movies without having to leave your house to go to Blockbuster, but what do you do when you get your entire account locked on the Microsoft Zune Marketplace because of one charge? You could lose your entire iTunes library because you failed to recognize one charge that your kid made without your permission. Any such event could (and very well may) actually cut you off from your entire media library while you resolve your situation, if you actually manage to solve it. What if someone cracks your Battle.NET account and uses your copy of World of WarCraft to run a gold farming bot or a cheating script, and now you lose access to your entire Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House funds. You could literally have thousands of dollars taken away from you without it being your fault in the slightest. You know, provided you have a time machine and go back to 2013 when the D3 RMAH was actually a thing. In any case, this is a real danger where you can lose a lot of value over a simple charge back, and there is little to protect you from this retaliatory account locking that distributors of digital goods are so fond of lording over us plebs. Again, this is a serious issue. Do consider it whenever you think about issuing a charge back on your accounts. Now, the more faithful a customer to a digital distributor you are, the more you get screwed over by complaining about them mistakenly charging you for things you didn't purchase, or other such situations where you are forced to issue a charge back because you couldn't get the vendor to resolve an issue with the money they charge you for transferring some data to your system. I won't even touch the discussion on how physical media cost the same as the digital access despite the obvious lack of printing the medium, producing it, shipping it, warehousing it, displaying it in a store, securing it in the store, advertising it in the store, and selling it via a cashier. Running the download and billing servers has to be several orders of magnitude less expensive, not to mention that some distributors (Blizzard) use peer to peer downloads to make you distribute the software for them in addition to downloading it. And somehow they are the same price. Go figure.
  - mortenjorck 10y ago
    Seconded. On the rare occasion that I will dispute a charge, I am one hundred percent sure I did not initiate it before contacting my card issuer. If I think there was an error rather than fraud, I'll always try to work it out with the merchant first rather than risk my welcome to do business with them in the future.
  - fenomas 10y ago
    FWIW, in principle I agree with both points being made, but in practice I just didn't want to be responsible for following the issue and making sure it got resolved correctly. I wanted to hear "oops, leave it to us" and then stop thinking about it. Perhaps worth adding, I was/am 99% sure how the charge occurred, and that it was a Heisenbug from when I'd trialled Prime. So there was no question of punishing them for being a bad vendor, I just needed them to bounce the issue around until it landed on someone who could fix it (which is essentially what happened). I think the real root cause of situations like this is that social teams sometimes have more/better options for escalating issues than customer support does.
  - nommm-nommm 10y ago
    That was not the case here though. Amazon probably said to dispute it because that is the way to get it to the right people. The advantage of that from your prospective is the CC company takes over with dealing with Amazon for you and it's off your shoulders.
    - eridius 10y ago
      Yes, but I wasn't responding to fenomas, I was responding to zaroth who said > Disputing the charge is the right thing to do in any case.
- cullenking 10y ago
  You are misguided in this. For the vendor/service provider/whatever, it's a $15 charge per chargeback regardless of the outcome. So If I sell you a monthly service for $6 per month and you forget to cancel it after three months, then at end of year check your statement and notice the charges and decide to make chargebacks to correct it...Then you just cost me 96 + 915, $189, which means I am in the hole $171 because you suck at managing your checkbook. This is bordering on ranting, but happens all the time and is just a cost of doing business, which means my regular customers get to pay more to deal with people like you. Contact the merchant first, they are usually very prompt and want to avoid chargebacks like the plague, because they cost real money.
  - gglitch 10y ago
    I'm sure you're right about the probability that many small business owners would still behave honorably if problems were brought to their attention first, but GP was, verbatim, referring to "bad charges coming in from the vendor," and "fraudulent or even mistaken charges," which is quite different than the negligent-customers scenario you're describing. Edit: Not to mention that GP is referring to an anecdote of GGP's in which Amazon told him to dispute the charge because they couldn't sort it out. That's disgraceful.
    - cullenking 10y ago
      Yeah, you could say I used the comment as a soap box to rant about something that I experience all the time :) In some cases chargebacks work great and should be used. I've honestly never had to use one, since merely mentioning it to any merchant or service has been enough to get my problem resolved promptly. Sorry for the derailment :)
  - zaroth 10y ago
    I completely agree that subscription charges for a service you signed up for and could have, but didn't bother to cancel is not a valid chargeback. If you initiate one and complete the interview questions honestly I think the chargeback would actually not be allowed. (Do you recognize the merchant? Yes. Did you approve the charge? Yes. Did the merchant deliver the product or service? Yes. Hmmm... Sorry, we can't refund your money) However there is a slippery slope. Two examples that hit me recently, an iDrive renewal where they refused to tell me the renewal price and their online form provided no way to opt-out of the renewal, their online chat told me to call a phone number, and it turns out the price was 10x the first year cost (and not at all competitive with any other backup service). Another was BitTorrent Sync which was supposed to be converted to a one-time license but then lo-and-behold a year later another charge showed up. But for merchants that provide the ability to cancel a subscription online, and who let users know before an annual charge is about to hit your card, I agree the customer has some responsibility to manage their subscription. My personal opinion is that monthly recurring billing can send invoices after the charge or even no email at all if charges are the same amount every month. Annual recurring should email a week before the charge to remind a customer it's coming, or should allow a full refund of the charge if contacted within 30 days of it hitting. For example LinkedIn refunded an annual recurring charge that I contacted them about within a few days of it hitting the card for a "subscription" I didn't actually want and it just took a single email to sort out. In any case, if I signed up online I must be able to cancel online with a click. I won't play games with merchants who have dark patterns that make me jump through hoops or pick up a phone to manage an online subscription. These merchants deserve the extra chargebacks they get, and they know exactly how they could reduce their chargeback rates. They've just done the math and found the dark patterns unfortunately are net-profitable.
dawnerd 10y ago
Exactly. Whats amazing is I was able to get the DMV of all places to help me out. https://twitter.com/CA_DMV/status/698272726788632576 https://twitter.com/CA_DMV/status/698272726788632576 They ended up calling me to make sure everything was right, and called back a few weeks later to make sure I got my ID. Never had to step foot in an office like their phone support said I would.
rconti 10y ago
Annoying but true. I'm not sure if it's because they're more worried about bad PR, or if the number of people complaining on Twitter is smaller than the number complaining via formal channels (and hence can be taken more seriously).. or if they're considered more technically advanced and hence their problems are more likely to be "legitimate"... or what.
- fenomas 10y ago
  I'd say it's a natural result of structure. Social teams can be small and internal because they can choose where to spend their time - they probably ignore 99% of the tweets they see ("Customer support can help you with that. Thanks!"). Hence they can focus on stuff that actually needs escalation, and being internal they're more likely to have met somebody who'd want to know about an unusual issue, etc. Whereas phone support is the opposite - it's designed to be handle the 99% bulk of requests that you wouldn't want to be escalated, so it's not too surprising that it's not as good at handling outliers.
rahoulb 10y ago
My bank (NatWest) kept sending me my bank statements in Braille, even though I had opted out of paper statements completely. Six months of calling them up on the phone or going into branch; each time I was told it was sorted, only for the next month another braille statement to arrive. Complained about it on twitter and within four hours it was fixed. They don't seem to care unless there's a chance of other people noticing.
- mseebach 10y ago
  I don't think it's malice, or at least as cynical as you make it. It might as well be as simple as the social customer service department being younger and thus not having been subject to the iron law of bureaucracy for so long. Their budget possibly comes out of marketing, not customer service, and thus isn't subject to being considered a pure cost centre. Social media is sexy, when someone from that department makes a call, they are more likely to reach someone who think it's fun to dig into an issue that when someone from the phone bank (to the extent they're encouraged or even allowed to) reaches out. Finally, both volume and S/N of social media pings are much better for many firms as long as the people contacting you through those channels tend towards being young and savvy, but that will change quickly as people catch on, and the canned "Oh I'm sorry to hear that, please call our customer service department on ...." responses that we're already starting to see will become much more prevalent. When thinking about customer service in big companies, it's important to remember that the vast majority of calls legitimately are of the sort that only require a very simple action to be taken, and then to be disconnected as quickly as possible. However frustrating, it's not irrational hatred of customers that makes it difficult to break through that assumption when you do have a more complicated issue.
  - jamesblonde 10y ago
    Nah, i'm more cynical. I had to complain publicly about ResearchGate to get off their spam email lists. It worked. Nothing else worked.
  - gglitch 10y ago
    That's like telling someone upset about a cold meal not to blame the waiter because it could be the cook's fault. Who's at fault is not at issue. What's at issue is that the customer can only get problems solved when the company's reputation is at stake, which is a failure of integrity.
GurnB 10y ago
I've had better response from @amazon than contacting them directly. My normal method now is to post first, then contact them directly. Direct contact has become their Tier 0 support.
Grishnakh 10y ago
This sucks... from what I'm reading here (both your post and a bunch of replies), I'll have to sign up for a Twitter account to get decent customer service in the future.

by fenomas 10y ago

zaroth 10y ago

Disputing the charge is the right thing to do in any case. Your CC company should make it very easy to login and mark the charge as problematic. They want to know if bad charges are coming in from the vendor, and this is the best way to track it. I personally don't think twice about disputing fraudulent or even mistaken charges. I can see how you might want to reserve this tool as an all-else-fails, but really CC companies should be appreciative of people using the tool because it gives them useful signals. Much better than the many many others who are missing the charge and paying for it by mistake.

eridius 10y ago
Disputing a charge just because you don't immediately know what it is, is not a good idea. At least, not if you want to continue doing business with the vendor that made the charge. Companies tend to take a dim view of people issuing chargebacks.
- zaroth 10y ago
  That's an interesting perspective. I take a dim view of companies charging my card incorrectly. Particularly Amazon since they submit many separate charges for items within a a single order, making it virtually impossible to verify the charges. I believe it is against the merchant agreement to withhold service after a valid charge-back. That would be a major and unwarranted retaliation, which you could probably sue and win a large class action if this is really happening. I will say, I should have made more clear, the first step in a dispute will be to contact the merchant. They will have a fixed number of days to reply and correct the problem.
  - ccrush 10y ago
    There was a somewhat recent case of someone having their amazon account with all their media they purchased licenses to view via their Amazon account taken away from them permanently for issuing a charge back due to some disputed activity on their account. So, before you go around issuing charge backs, you should think of the consequences of disputing your account status with that merchant. You may end up losing access to ALL your Steam games just because some kid cracked your password and purchased a $1 game with your account. This is the danger of having an account on these digital distribution sites everyone seems to be so fond of. Sure, you can download your movies without having to leave your house to go to Blockbuster, but what do you do when you get your entire account locked on the Microsoft Zune Marketplace because of one charge? You could lose your entire iTunes library because you failed to recognize one charge that your kid made without your permission. Any such event could (and very well may) actually cut you off from your entire media library while you resolve your situation, if you actually manage to solve it. What if someone cracks your Battle.NET account and uses your copy of World of WarCraft to run a gold farming bot or a cheating script, and now you lose access to your entire Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House funds. You could literally have thousands of dollars taken away from you without it being your fault in the slightest. You know, provided you have a time machine and go back to 2013 when the D3 RMAH was actually a thing. In any case, this is a real danger where you can lose a lot of value over a simple charge back, and there is little to protect you from this retaliatory account locking that distributors of digital goods are so fond of lording over us plebs. Again, this is a serious issue. Do consider it whenever you think about issuing a charge back on your accounts. Now, the more faithful a customer to a digital distributor you are, the more you get screwed over by complaining about them mistakenly charging you for things you didn't purchase, or other such situations where you are forced to issue a charge back because you couldn't get the vendor to resolve an issue with the money they charge you for transferring some data to your system. I won't even touch the discussion on how physical media cost the same as the digital access despite the obvious lack of printing the medium, producing it, shipping it, warehousing it, displaying it in a store, securing it in the store, advertising it in the store, and selling it via a cashier. Running the download and billing servers has to be several orders of magnitude less expensive, not to mention that some distributors (Blizzard) use peer to peer downloads to make you distribute the software for them in addition to downloading it. And somehow they are the same price. Go figure.
- mortenjorck 10y ago
  Seconded. On the rare occasion that I will dispute a charge, I am one hundred percent sure I did not initiate it before contacting my card issuer. If I think there was an error rather than fraud, I'll always try to work it out with the merchant first rather than risk my welcome to do business with them in the future.
- fenomas 10y ago
  FWIW, in principle I agree with both points being made, but in practice I just didn't want to be responsible for following the issue and making sure it got resolved correctly. I wanted to hear "oops, leave it to us" and then stop thinking about it. Perhaps worth adding, I was/am 99% sure how the charge occurred, and that it was a Heisenbug from when I'd trialled Prime. So there was no question of punishing them for being a bad vendor, I just needed them to bounce the issue around until it landed on someone who could fix it (which is essentially what happened). I think the real root cause of situations like this is that social teams sometimes have more/better options for escalating issues than customer support does.
- nommm-nommm 10y ago
  That was not the case here though. Amazon probably said to dispute it because that is the way to get it to the right people. The advantage of that from your prospective is the CC company takes over with dealing with Amazon for you and it's off your shoulders.
  - eridius 10y ago
    Yes, but I wasn't responding to fenomas, I was responding to zaroth who said > Disputing the charge is the right thing to do in any case.
cullenking 10y ago
You are misguided in this. For the vendor/service provider/whatever, it's a $15 charge per chargeback regardless of the outcome. So If I sell you a monthly service for $6 per month and you forget to cancel it after three months, then at end of year check your statement and notice the charges and decide to make chargebacks to correct it...Then you just cost me 96 + 915, $189, which means I am in the hole $171 because you suck at managing your checkbook. This is bordering on ranting, but happens all the time and is just a cost of doing business, which means my regular customers get to pay more to deal with people like you. Contact the merchant first, they are usually very prompt and want to avoid chargebacks like the plague, because they cost real money.
- gglitch 10y ago
  I'm sure you're right about the probability that many small business owners would still behave honorably if problems were brought to their attention first, but GP was, verbatim, referring to "bad charges coming in from the vendor," and "fraudulent or even mistaken charges," which is quite different than the negligent-customers scenario you're describing. Edit: Not to mention that GP is referring to an anecdote of GGP's in which Amazon told him to dispute the charge because they couldn't sort it out. That's disgraceful.
  - cullenking 10y ago
    Yeah, you could say I used the comment as a soap box to rant about something that I experience all the time :) In some cases chargebacks work great and should be used. I've honestly never had to use one, since merely mentioning it to any merchant or service has been enough to get my problem resolved promptly. Sorry for the derailment :)
- zaroth 10y ago
  I completely agree that subscription charges for a service you signed up for and could have, but didn't bother to cancel is not a valid chargeback. If you initiate one and complete the interview questions honestly I think the chargeback would actually not be allowed. (Do you recognize the merchant? Yes. Did you approve the charge? Yes. Did the merchant deliver the product or service? Yes. Hmmm... Sorry, we can't refund your money) However there is a slippery slope. Two examples that hit me recently, an iDrive renewal where they refused to tell me the renewal price and their online form provided no way to opt-out of the renewal, their online chat told me to call a phone number, and it turns out the price was 10x the first year cost (and not at all competitive with any other backup service). Another was BitTorrent Sync which was supposed to be converted to a one-time license but then lo-and-behold a year later another charge showed up. But for merchants that provide the ability to cancel a subscription online, and who let users know before an annual charge is about to hit your card, I agree the customer has some responsibility to manage their subscription. My personal opinion is that monthly recurring billing can send invoices after the charge or even no email at all if charges are the same amount every month. Annual recurring should email a week before the charge to remind a customer it's coming, or should allow a full refund of the charge if contacted within 30 days of it hitting. For example LinkedIn refunded an annual recurring charge that I contacted them about within a few days of it hitting the card for a "subscription" I didn't actually want and it just took a single email to sort out. In any case, if I signed up online I must be able to cancel online with a click. I won't play games with merchants who have dark patterns that make me jump through hoops or pick up a phone to manage an online subscription. These merchants deserve the extra chargebacks they get, and they know exactly how they could reduce their chargeback rates. They've just done the math and found the dark patterns unfortunately are net-profitable.

dawnerd 10y ago

Exactly. Whats amazing is I was able to get the DMV of all places to help me out. https://twitter.com/CA_DMV/status/698272726788632576 https://twitter.com/CA_DMV/status/698272726788632576 They ended up calling me to make sure everything was right, and called back a few weeks later to make sure I got my ID. Never had to step foot in an office like their phone support said I would.

rconti 10y ago

Annoying but true. I'm not sure if it's because they're more worried about bad PR, or if the number of people complaining on Twitter is smaller than the number complaining via formal channels (and hence can be taken more seriously).. or if they're considered more technically advanced and hence their problems are more likely to be "legitimate"... or what.

fenomas 10y ago
I'd say it's a natural result of structure. Social teams can be small and internal because they can choose where to spend their time - they probably ignore 99% of the tweets they see ("Customer support can help you with that. Thanks!"). Hence they can focus on stuff that actually needs escalation, and being internal they're more likely to have met somebody who'd want to know about an unusual issue, etc. Whereas phone support is the opposite - it's designed to be handle the 99% bulk of requests that you wouldn't want to be escalated, so it's not too surprising that it's not as good at handling outliers.

rahoulb 10y ago

My bank (NatWest) kept sending me my bank statements in Braille, even though I had opted out of paper statements completely. Six months of calling them up on the phone or going into branch; each time I was told it was sorted, only for the next month another braille statement to arrive. Complained about it on twitter and within four hours it was fixed. They don't seem to care unless there's a chance of other people noticing.

mseebach 10y ago
I don't think it's malice, or at least as cynical as you make it. It might as well be as simple as the social customer service department being younger and thus not having been subject to the iron law of bureaucracy for so long. Their budget possibly comes out of marketing, not customer service, and thus isn't subject to being considered a pure cost centre. Social media is sexy, when someone from that department makes a call, they are more likely to reach someone who think it's fun to dig into an issue that when someone from the phone bank (to the extent they're encouraged or even allowed to) reaches out. Finally, both volume and S/N of social media pings are much better for many firms as long as the people contacting you through those channels tend towards being young and savvy, but that will change quickly as people catch on, and the canned "Oh I'm sorry to hear that, please call our customer service department on ...." responses that we're already starting to see will become much more prevalent. When thinking about customer service in big companies, it's important to remember that the vast majority of calls legitimately are of the sort that only require a very simple action to be taken, and then to be disconnected as quickly as possible. However frustrating, it's not irrational hatred of customers that makes it difficult to break through that assumption when you do have a more complicated issue.
- jamesblonde 10y ago
  Nah, i'm more cynical. I had to complain publicly about ResearchGate to get off their spam email lists. It worked. Nothing else worked.
- gglitch 10y ago
  That's like telling someone upset about a cold meal not to blame the waiter because it could be the cook's fault. Who's at fault is not at issue. What's at issue is that the customer can only get problems solved when the company's reputation is at stake, which is a failure of integrity.

GurnB 10y ago

I've had better response from @amazon than contacting them directly. My normal method now is to post first, then contact them directly. Direct contact has become their Tier 0 support.

Grishnakh 10y ago

This sucks... from what I'm reading here (both your post and a bunch of replies), I'll have to sign up for a Twitter account to get decent customer service in the future.