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If you accept abuse with a smile, then you're just going to keep on receiving abuse. The reason companies get away with providing this kind of appalling custome

If you accept abuse with a smile, then you're just going to keep on receiving abuse. The reason companies get away with providing this kind of appalling customer service is because too many people put up with it out of politeness. By the time I've been treated like this by a company, I've already made up my mind to stop using their service ASAP. When I finally get through to an operator, my aims are: 1. Get a fix to my immediate problem. 2. Waste as much of the company's time, money and goodwill as possible. They've wasted my time by putting me on hold, but every minute I spend arguing with an operator or, better yet, a supervisor, is time the company is paying someone for, and has an opportunity cost, because they're not speaking to some other customer. 3. Piss–off the operator enough that they'll consider quitting their job. I do feel sympathy for people who work in these call centres, but only the same way I'd feel sympathy for the soldier of an evil regime. It doesn't stop me viewing them as the enemy. Right now there is a metastasised corporate approach to running customer service that has focussed on cutting costs and outsourcing to the point that the actual service provided is totally dysfunctional. The result is that if you have any problem, with any large company, it is a crapshoot whether you will ever get it fixed. This situation is a deliberate choice on the part of the companies involved. This won't change by people being calm and friendly and swallowing their anger, any more than politics ever gets fixed by people voting for the marginally less corrupt/incompetent candidate every four years. And anyone who tells you it will is either naive or dishonest. This situation will only change through a revolution in consumer behaviour that makes it too difficult and/or expensive for the companies to continue as is. Companies that think it's OK to treat their customers like garbage need to be met with concentrated and directed anger at every opportunity. Giving their customer services employees such hell that they can't retain them is just the start of it. When it becomes impossible for companies to act like this without unleashing a tsunami of fury from every direction, you can bet they'll change their approach pretty quickly.

cm2012 10y ago
You are poorly rationalizing being shitty if you behave that way to phone operators.
throwanem 10y ago
In a former life, I worked Tier 1 for one of America's largest credit card company. We had a lot more latitude than you seem to realize or care to know. I once, over ninety minutes and three credit department reps, convinced the organization to extend additional credit to a woman dying of terminal cancer, so that she'd be able to afford pain medication a while longer. This was of course a bad credit risk, in the sense that she had no realistic prospect of ever repaying her debts, or indeed of living long enough to do so; I don't know whether you are familiar at all with terminal illness, and I hope for your sake you are not, but there is often a point at which acceptance and exhaustion become perceptible in a person's voice, and she had passed it. You would of course argue that it's of no significance to the company whether such a person dies peacefully or otherwise, and to a certain extent this is of course true. What you overlook is that companies, even very large ones, are made of people, and that those people have agency and will surprisingly often go very far out of their way in order to help a customer, even if doing so might carry a personal cost for them. (In the case I describe, it cost me about $400. I knew it would. Some things matter.) I also dealt with people who operated under the idea that being unpleasant to me would benefit them somehow. At least, I assume some of them thought that way; others no doubt were just nasty people in general. The thing about serving as the human interface to a company is that we don't stop being human when we put our headsets on and log in to the PBX, and the thing about latitude is that it goes both ways. Recognize our shared humanity despite your entirely reasonable frustration and behave toward me on that basis, and I'll go to great effort to help you, even if it costs me something. Treat me as a disposable vessel for your anger at some imaginary cipher you cherish of the company for which I work, and you're going to have a damn hard time getting so much as a late fee waived. (Oh, and by the way - you're not going to make me think about quitting my job, and it is a comedy of arrogance that you imagine otherwise. You are 1/150 of my average daily workload. Do you really think you have power over me? You have the power to ruin your reputation among my colleagues - we can't say things like "what an asshole" in account notes, for reasons of professionalism and liability, but we can convey the same meaning in other words, and we do. And you have the power to influence my analysis of whether it is worth my limited time to come to your assistance with whatever problem has prompted your call. But to imagine you have the power in a three-minute phone call to materially affect the course of my life and the decisions I make therein? What astonishing hubris!) You inveigh against "companies that think it's OK to treat their customers like garbage", and in that, and that alone, you're not wrong. But you fail to realize, or perhaps to care, that, when you interact with customer service, you aren't talking to companies, but to people. You seem to think that treating those people with cruelty has value. It does not. Such behavior is both counterproductive and beneath you. It also, in my professional experience, is much less common than I think you suspect - you really are an outlier here, and whatever mass movement of which you imagine yourself to be a part really does not exist. I have to say I feel for you - it must be awfully lonely to be where you are. But the extent of my sympathy is strictly circumscribed by the fact that you bring it on yourself.

cm2012 10y ago

You are poorly rationalizing being shitty if you behave that way to phone operators.

throwanem 10y ago

In a former life, I worked Tier 1 for one of America's largest credit card company. We had a lot more latitude than you seem to realize or care to know. I once, over ninety minutes and three credit department reps, convinced the organization to extend additional credit to a woman dying of terminal cancer, so that she'd be able to afford pain medication a while longer. This was of course a bad credit risk, in the sense that she had no realistic prospect of ever repaying her debts, or indeed of living long enough to do so; I don't know whether you are familiar at all with terminal illness, and I hope for your sake you are not, but there is often a point at which acceptance and exhaustion become perceptible in a person's voice, and she had passed it. You would of course argue that it's of no significance to the company whether such a person dies peacefully or otherwise, and to a certain extent this is of course true. What you overlook is that companies, even very large ones, are made of people, and that those people have agency and will surprisingly often go very far out of their way in order to help a customer, even if doing so might carry a personal cost for them. (In the case I describe, it cost me about $400. I knew it would. Some things matter.) I also dealt with people who operated under the idea that being unpleasant to me would benefit them somehow. At least, I assume some of them thought that way; others no doubt were just nasty people in general. The thing about serving as the human interface to a company is that we don't stop being human when we put our headsets on and log in to the PBX, and the thing about latitude is that it goes both ways. Recognize our shared humanity despite your entirely reasonable frustration and behave toward me on that basis, and I'll go to great effort to help you, even if it costs me something. Treat me as a disposable vessel for your anger at some imaginary cipher you cherish of the company for which I work, and you're going to have a damn hard time getting so much as a late fee waived. (Oh, and by the way - you're not going to make me think about quitting my job, and it is a comedy of arrogance that you imagine otherwise. You are 1/150 of my average daily workload. Do you really think you have power over me? You have the power to ruin your reputation among my colleagues - we can't say things like "what an asshole" in account notes, for reasons of professionalism and liability, but we can convey the same meaning in other words, and we do. And you have the power to influence my analysis of whether it is worth my limited time to come to your assistance with whatever problem has prompted your call. But to imagine you have the power in a three-minute phone call to materially affect the course of my life and the decisions I make therein? What astonishing hubris!) You inveigh against "companies that think it's OK to treat their customers like garbage", and in that, and that alone, you're not wrong. But you fail to realize, or perhaps to care, that, when you interact with customer service, you aren't talking to companies, but to people. You seem to think that treating those people with cruelty has value. It does not. Such behavior is both counterproductive and beneath you. It also, in my professional experience, is much less common than I think you suspect - you really are an outlier here, and whatever mass movement of which you imagine yourself to be a part really does not exist. I have to say I feel for you - it must be awfully lonely to be where you are. But the extent of my sympathy is strictly circumscribed by the fact that you bring it on yourself.