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Bad Customer Service Is Profitable

105 points by EndXA 7y ago

the_snooze 7y ago
It's not just companies structuring their customer service to reduce redress payouts. Companies are also using customer service as a sales channel, where "customer support" reps are also marketers trying to up-sell you something. When you have a problem you want to get fixed and you've waited on hold for a long time after navigating a terrible voice-prompt system, you're a great captive audience.
- vegetablepotpie 7y ago
  I think that’s a consequence of the profit-center cost-center dichotomy. Cost centers get budget cuts, downsized and off-shored. Profit centers help grow the business. If there’s a way to be a profit center, managers are going to take that route. The consequence is that customers asking for assistance on their existing services are going to get sales pitches for more expensive services.
noodlesUK 7y ago
When there’s no market pressure in a sector, why would any company do anything but the cheapest possible customer service offerings? I recently had to deal with trying to convince my ISP to cancel a charge for a wifi router that I don’t even have, and upon them crediting me for the over billing, I received an email from UPS telling me a router had shipped (which I will have to send back). This all increases revenue for the company and it’s not like there are other people who have a fiber line to my house, so what am I to do?
ntetsuo 7y ago
The article states that reaching Tier2 is more of a hassle for black or Latino customers. What? Thank you for that original title also. How about this one, “Why do companies succeed? Because their profitable”. Why don’t you stop letting 8’th graders write and title articles?
deogeo 7y ago
> There may be a hidden layer of discrimination at play here as well. Studies and surveys have shown that some segments of consumers, such as women, African Americans, and Latinos, may experience higher hassle costs when dealing with customer service. Their source for the 'women' part of that claim only says that, given the same treatment, women get more annoyed than men [1]. Not what I would classify as 'discrimination'. [1] https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2011/06/women-get-more-annoyed-than-men-with-aspects-of-bad-customer-service/index.htm https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2011/06/women-get-m...
- boomboomsubban 7y ago
  >Not what I would classify as 'discrimination'. No, but it does classify as different hassle costs as they claim. The summary words it poorly, but the article is just showing that some groups experience more hassle than others.
  - deogeo 7y ago
    No, the sourced article says that some groups get more annoyed than others, when exposed to the same hassle.
    - Filligree 7y ago
      Hence, higher hassle cost.
    - boomboomsubban 7y ago
      That source doesn't say that they were exposed to the same hassle, the hassle can't be the same in survey accounts. Not really the point though.
      - deogeo 7y ago
        The source presents a survey asking "How annoyed were you by X", with women answering as more annoyed for the same X. How you interpret that as "hassle can't be the same in survey accounts", I have no idea.
foobar_ 7y ago
Depends on the class of the customer. Poor and middle-class customers are usually screwed.
- jdnenej 7y ago
  Get what you pay for. I work on some enterprise software with customers paying $1m/year. I assure you they don't get bad customer service.
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    Really? My company pays a lot of money for some support contracts. We get a lot of attention, E-mails and meetings from sales people and evangelists but not too much in terms of actual solutions for problems. Basically a lot of hot air.
    - teddyh 7y ago
      This indicates that the people using the product are not the same people who are deciding whether to purchase said product. In that case, there are no incentives to give solutions to problems, because it doesn’t affect sales.
      - PeterisP 7y ago
        "the people using the product are not the same people who are deciding whether to purchase said product" - of course, that's pretty much the definition of enterprise product sales. "That case" is not a rare exception but the default situation.
  - wolco 7y ago
    Are they getting that worth? If it costs 500k to service that account then it makes sense to continue that level of support. If it costs 2 million, support quality will drop quickly.
  - PeterisP 7y ago
    When I was on the customer side for two products that each had seven figure "maintenance" contracts, when reporting product bugs causing damage, the customer service was bad and useless anyway.
supercanuck 7y ago
Capitalism only works when there is competition.
tenebrisalietum 7y ago
I get the feeling the researchers never worked in a call center and don't understand the realities involved in running one. The reason why you have a first level, and then levels after that, is so Level 1 can be focused on speed for simple issues, or routing for non-simple issues. Level 1 call work is not something the more expensive agents who can solve complex work should be doing. Another alternative is doing what Sprint did over ten years ago and firing their worst customers (https://www.cnet.com/news/sprint-breaks-up-with-high-maintenance-customers/ https://www.cnet.com/news/sprint-breaks-up-with-high-mainten...). It'd probably be better if more companies could do that, though there are companies where it is not possible (e.g. ISPs).
- badrabbit 7y ago
  That's so horrible. There should be laws to prevent companies from refusing to do business with "high maintenance" customers without proper documentation and regulation. What recourse does the customer have to contest their decision? What if sprint tells other carriers about this customer? Just like with employees, if you get to fire a customer then how you aquire customers and how you refuse to do business with customers should be subject to regulation. I would even say this should be public record so other customers can see exactly why they blacklist customers. FYI: I have worked in a call center type environment for a company well reputed for having bad customer service. I have faced horrible customers day in and day out until one reallybad customer pushed me off the edge and I quit. I still stand by my position that consumer rights and fair treatment of the public by businesses is much more important than a company's right to refuse to do business with anyone.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - leesalminen 7y ago
    Just yesterday one of my tier 1 chat agents received a death threat from a long time problem customer. I don’t tolerate threats from customers on my team, so we immediately terminated their service and contacted law enforcement.
Marsymars 7y ago
Redress payouts aren't everything. I'm currently in the process of changing my primary email and moving all my accounts over to new addresses. Probably 90% were easy to change online myself, but there's a tail of businesses that are trying to tell me it's impossible to either change my email or delete my account, forcing me to escalate to departments that really shouldn't be having their time wasted with either problem.
- mattmanser 7y ago
  Well, you don't know that. It could be that developing proper processes, training and tools to handle it costs far more than the rare few times they need to pass it up to someone to manually change it in a DB.
  - Marsymars 7y ago
    Yes, I get that, but these are large corporations where there doesn't even exist any way to "pass it up" to someone in IT from the standard CSR channels. e.g. one of them had $15B in revenue last year and an actual privacy office, which I guess will be my next step to contact.
hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
This seems very much like a 'water is wet' type of study. And to clarify, it's not really a study - the authors just interviewed some call center managers and came to the (pretty obvious conclusion to anyone who has ever called customer service) that companies put up barriers to getting refunds. I agree with other commenters, though, for me the issue is not often about getting a refund, but more often about getting the information I need to solve my problem.
williesleg 7y ago
When I hear someone from our of the country answer I always hang up. No exceptions. They never help, ever.
zebraflask 7y ago
Well, of course, this all makes perfect sense. If a company pushes out a bad product or service or other generally subpar what have you, the first line of defense is to make it as difficult as possible for customers to have any good resolution to their complaints.
DoctorOetker 7y ago
consider a total budget for customer service, why not hire 2 or more customer service subcontractors on the following contract: customer questions are randomly assigned, and money flows proportionally toward the company with the better customer satisfaction scores? any question a subcontractor has not enough information for will be between the customer service contractor and the original company, and they don't need to be afraid of insisting the original company resolve a real fundamental issue with the product as the other subcontractor faces the same issues, which has the side effect of the subcontractors summarizing a large number of complaints for the original companies product engineers etc consider how for a long time many manufacturers didn't want to spend the time and effort to fix some linux driver, not because they couldn't but because they didn't want to plough through 10k complaints or requests, of unknown similarity or difference, and having the original high wage engineers plough through them is uneconomical, so have the subcontractor summarize the issue concisely yet precisely
- mlthoughts2018 7y ago
  What subcontractor would accept this arrangement? I sure wouldn’t. It’s like an evil genie situation. You’re never going to define customer satisfaction metrics in a way that won’t end up being gamefied to circumvent the spirit of what you’re supposed to do to help customers in order to maximize some metrics. This issues can also be related to the company itself. What if there’s an undisclosed bug in your randomization process based on IP or time zone or something that tilts the satisfaction metrics via an almost impossible to detect skew in the customer distribution routed to subcontractor A instead of B? What if you the company introduce a policy or product change that makes customers unhappy even if the subcontractor is doing exactly what you asked them to do? Or what if subcontractors realize the only way to make people happy is to do something really expensive or unapproved by you?
  - DoctorOetker 7y ago
    > .. skew in the customer distribution routed to subcontractor A instead of B? provably rolling a random dice is a solved problem, superstition that fluctuations in a cryptographically verifiable random coin flip would correlate with "pathologically dissatisfied customers" is just that: superstition. > What if you the company introduce a policy or product change that makes customers unhappy even if the subcontractor is doing exactly what you asked them to do? That would make the customers assigned to the other subcontractors equally unhappy, so the customer satisfaction feedback drop will be the same for the other competing subcontractor, and so the budget division will be unaffected, but still tilted proportional to the gross difference in performance between subcontractor A and B > Or what if subcontractors realize the only way to make people happy is to do something really expensive or unapproved by you? What do you mean? reverse engineer a driver and rewrite a better one?
nmstoker 7y ago
I hear anecdotally about these "levels" and it's an obvious strategy, but in my experience, I usually get paid back without escalation (that's not to say they aren't escalating the matter discretely on their side w/o passing me up a level). The only obvious way they might be masking it is if I have to call back another day but that doesn't seem like I get through to anyone differently than if I'd just called up (thus I suspect it would be level 1)
perl4ever 7y ago
I've found that email support varies wildly, and you don't get the quality you might expect. I've asked simple questions of a financial institution that I trust with most of my savings, and gotten responses that totally ignored everything I wrote except for a keyword or two, as if they were an Eliza-style AI. On the other hand, I emailed a question to my health insurer, and I got a completely sensible, intelligent, and helpful response. Even in person, I frequently ask a simple question and people act like I've got two heads. Sometimes the businesses they work for are objectively honest and competent, but somehow they can't answer a really basic question. Like the other day, I was replacing some fire extinguishers and I realized I had just signed off on new ones without understanding the UL rating. Granted, it wasn't that hard to find an explanation online after a few minutes, but someone who works for a business that sells them to everybody in the area should be able and willing to explain. I don't think this can all be economically rational optimization.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  A lender miscalculated my monthly loan payment, so I wrote up a nice email to them, attached an amortization spreadsheet, linked to a public google sheets in case they can’t download attachments, and attached a pdf showing them the calculations. It took 6 weeks and over 10 emails for them to fix it to the correct amortization. This is literally this company’s entire purpose, to calculate payment amounts, and they couldn’t take 20 seconds to use the PMT() function in a spreadsheet to see they had made a mistake. I forwarded the account of my experience to as many bosses at the company I could find and never heard back.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    Well, I understand it's a binary thing, that most people can't analyze anything they haven't seen before, and that most companies don't employ customer service reps who can, because they have better opportunities. That's why it was shocking to me that the health insurance company did have such people and a financial company didn't. I just gave up with the latter, no "10 emails fixed it".
  - zaroth 7y ago
b_tterc_p 7y ago
I feel like in the past few years customer service has gotten much better for most companies. I have had reasonably concise and helpful calls with my bank, telecom provider, utilities, phone company, and one product company within the past year and they all went pretty well despite negative reputations for a few. Online chat windows seem to be the most effective for me. Curious if this resonates
- toast0 7y ago
  The online chat windows work pretty well for me, the written record usually means at least I don't need to repeat myself to every new person, and often the chat windows are tied to my account so I don't need to identify myself. And, it's much easier for me to multitask while waiting for a response, but we can have a quick back and forth when it gets to that part of the call. However, what has really helped the most is lowering my expectations. If the other person seems to understand what I'm asking, I'm satisfied, if not happy when they say it can't be done.
Animats 7y ago
Perhaps poor customer service should be considered an indicator that an antitrust breakup is needed. This isn't that far from European Union antitrust guidelines.[1] See Article 102, which has "limiting production, markets or technical development to the prejudice of consumers" This ties in with the EU warranty obligation.[3] A key point in EU law is that "competition" is encouraged for the benefit of the consumer. US antitrust law is based on protecting smaller sellers from big ones. Something to look at if Elizabeth Warren becomes president. [1] https://ec.europa.eu/competition/antitrust/overview_en.html https://ec.europa.eu/competition/antitrust/overview_en.html [2] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX:12008E102 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX:12... [3] https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/dealing-with-customers/consumer-contracts-guarantees/consumer-guarantees/index_en.htm https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/dealing-with-customers...
- Proven 7y ago
  > Perhaps poor customer service should be considered an indicator that an antitrust breakup is needed. No, it's an indicator that the government has successfully created enough barrier entries that market doesn't work well. Less regulation that "protects" customers and less government intrusion is the solution. It's incredible to me that someone would mention the EU as an example of how to do things. It's the worst place for customers and the amount of tax governments steal on the account of protecting consumers surely dramatically outweighs aggregate benefits of such large scale fraud schemes such as those in the EU. In the EU VAT is commonly 15-20%. Buy the same product or service anywhere else and you save 10-15%. Who in the world charges 10-15% for customer service? No one but the lazy and bloated European governments.
- dantheman 7y ago
  I wouldn't look to the EU for innovation or economic policy.
  - anovikov 7y ago
    Exactly. I struggle to see in what we succeed here which is higher tech than making really good croissants and coffee. Even when we are, it usually happens in Eastern European states like Estonia who are definitely not drivers of economic policy.
Proven 7y ago
The title doesn't make any sense, and the lined article fails to make sense as well. If the customer service sucks to the point that it diminishes a product's or service's value, the customer looks for better value. It is only in sectors where the government obstructs competition (well, most of them these days) where it is possible to provide a shitty service and hang onto your customers. But that isn't because companies profit from providing shitty service but because they profit from barriers to entry created by the corrupt government.
twopens 7y ago
I spent several years in both Tier 1 and Tier 2 support for several companies. Generally speaking, I found companies that failed to provide a high level of support did so not because it was particularly profitable, but because they either A) Wanted to cut costs and off-shore as much of the operations as possible or B) Were struggling financially and unable to support their product Working as Tier 2 support for Apple I can tell you that I gave away free products (From the Apple Online Store) constantly. I required no approval for products $300 and under in value. The only caveat being that Apple did not give away ANY of its own products. Some days I would give away more money in free products than I made working that day. Apple is doing fantastic financially. When I worked for Frontier Communications (Who are currently being investigated on a few fronts for failing to maintain their network and refused to take questions from investors at their last quarterly earnings call) I was basically unable to help anyone who called in unless their problem was user error. Any customer who had an issue with something on our end was basically given the shaft. I've had much more middle of the road experiences as well, but those are the two polar opposites that I've had in my early working experience.
natmaka 7y ago
Your customer who struggled in order to have your product work tolerably will think twice before trying to switch to a competitor, as he doesn't want to once more live through hassles. You spare money on service/support, and the customer is less prone to abandon you. Yay. A competitor offering a better service may seem dangerous because his customers will recommend him. However he as to sell for a higher price, therefore most customers will not consider his product. Moreover most of his customers will be picky (easily by the shitty support provided by you and your pairs) or dumb/lazy (totally unable/unwilling to think/act usefully by themselves), and their demands will only grow, leading him tto somewhat reduce his margins (and you will buy him, because he as less customers and less profit per customer) or raise his prices (and enter some high-end/luxury (<=> small) niche).
pjc50 7y ago
See also http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2012/01/21/the-politics-of-call-centres-part-one/ http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2012/01/21/the-politics-of-...
DayDollar 7y ago
What i do not get, is why there is not a "Lawyer"-Layer between customers and companys shirking customers-service. Basically you dont get to worry and put up with what is essentially a denial on service attack on a person, and these people get you whatever you want if they can and fight for your rights, if necessary with legal actions. If they want a war of attrition, a war of attrition they could get. Also likeable, social customers, who get shafted, become basically anti-evanglists of a brand and product. Im pretty sure, if marketing would do some research, these "Warning"-network effects would show up. I had several family dinners, where one or another would tell horror stories about a product they tryied and these are shunned afterwards. Only companys who can get away with it are entrenched network effect companys like google.
aksss 7y ago
Ask Adobe

105 points by EndXA 7y ago

It's not just companies structuring their customer service to reduce redress payouts. Companies are also using customer service as a sales channel, where "customer support" reps are also marketers trying to up-sell you something. When you have a problem you want to get fixed and you've waited on hold for a long time after navigating a terrible voice-prompt system, you're a great captive audience.

vegetablepotpie 7y ago
I think that’s a consequence of the profit-center cost-center dichotomy. Cost centers get budget cuts, downsized and off-shored. Profit centers help grow the business. If there’s a way to be a profit center, managers are going to take that route. The consequence is that customers asking for assistance on their existing services are going to get sales pitches for more expensive services.

noodlesUK 7y ago

When there’s no market pressure in a sector, why would any company do anything but the cheapest possible customer service offerings? I recently had to deal with trying to convince my ISP to cancel a charge for a wifi router that I don’t even have, and upon them crediting me for the over billing, I received an email from UPS telling me a router had shipped (which I will have to send back). This all increases revenue for the company and it’s not like there are other people who have a fiber line to my house, so what am I to do?

ntetsuo 7y ago

The article states that reaching Tier2 is more of a hassle for black or Latino customers. What? Thank you for that original title also. How about this one, “Why do companies succeed? Because their profitable”. Why don’t you stop letting 8’th graders write and title articles?

deogeo 7y ago

> There may be a hidden layer of discrimination at play here as well. Studies and surveys have shown that some segments of consumers, such as women, African Americans, and Latinos, may experience higher hassle costs when dealing with customer service. Their source for the 'women' part of that claim only says that, given the same treatment, women get more annoyed than men [1]. Not what I would classify as 'discrimination'. [1] https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2011/06/women-get-more-annoyed-than-men-with-aspects-of-bad-customer-service/index.htm https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2011/06/women-get-m...

boomboomsubban 7y ago
>Not what I would classify as 'discrimination'. No, but it does classify as different hassle costs as they claim. The summary words it poorly, but the article is just showing that some groups experience more hassle than others.
- deogeo 7y ago
  No, the sourced article says that some groups get more annoyed than others, when exposed to the same hassle.
  - Filligree 7y ago
    Hence, higher hassle cost.
  - boomboomsubban 7y ago
    That source doesn't say that they were exposed to the same hassle, the hassle can't be the same in survey accounts. Not really the point though.
    - deogeo 7y ago
      The source presents a survey asking "How annoyed were you by X", with women answering as more annoyed for the same X. How you interpret that as "hassle can't be the same in survey accounts", I have no idea.

foobar_ 7y ago

Depends on the class of the customer. Poor and middle-class customers are usually screwed.

jdnenej 7y ago
Get what you pay for. I work on some enterprise software with customers paying $1m/year. I assure you they don't get bad customer service.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  Really? My company pays a lot of money for some support contracts. We get a lot of attention, E-mails and meetings from sales people and evangelists but not too much in terms of actual solutions for problems. Basically a lot of hot air.
  - teddyh 7y ago
    This indicates that the people using the product are not the same people who are deciding whether to purchase said product. In that case, there are no incentives to give solutions to problems, because it doesn’t affect sales.
    - PeterisP 7y ago
      "the people using the product are not the same people who are deciding whether to purchase said product" - of course, that's pretty much the definition of enterprise product sales. "That case" is not a rare exception but the default situation.
- wolco 7y ago
  Are they getting that worth? If it costs 500k to service that account then it makes sense to continue that level of support. If it costs 2 million, support quality will drop quickly.
- PeterisP 7y ago
  When I was on the customer side for two products that each had seven figure "maintenance" contracts, when reporting product bugs causing damage, the customer service was bad and useless anyway.

supercanuck 7y ago

Capitalism only works when there is competition.

tenebrisalietum 7y ago

I get the feeling the researchers never worked in a call center and don't understand the realities involved in running one. The reason why you have a first level, and then levels after that, is so Level 1 can be focused on speed for simple issues, or routing for non-simple issues. Level 1 call work is not something the more expensive agents who can solve complex work should be doing. Another alternative is doing what Sprint did over ten years ago and firing their worst customers (https://www.cnet.com/news/sprint-breaks-up-with-high-maintenance-customers/ https://www.cnet.com/news/sprint-breaks-up-with-high-mainten...). It'd probably be better if more companies could do that, though there are companies where it is not possible (e.g. ISPs).

badrabbit 7y ago
That's so horrible. There should be laws to prevent companies from refusing to do business with "high maintenance" customers without proper documentation and regulation. What recourse does the customer have to contest their decision? What if sprint tells other carriers about this customer? Just like with employees, if you get to fire a customer then how you aquire customers and how you refuse to do business with customers should be subject to regulation. I would even say this should be public record so other customers can see exactly why they blacklist customers. FYI: I have worked in a call center type environment for a company well reputed for having bad customer service. I have faced horrible customers day in and day out until one reallybad customer pushed me off the edge and I quit. I still stand by my position that consumer rights and fair treatment of the public by businesses is much more important than a company's right to refuse to do business with anyone.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- leesalminen 7y ago
  Just yesterday one of my tier 1 chat agents received a death threat from a long time problem customer. I don’t tolerate threats from customers on my team, so we immediately terminated their service and contacted law enforcement.

Marsymars 7y ago

Redress payouts aren't everything. I'm currently in the process of changing my primary email and moving all my accounts over to new addresses. Probably 90% were easy to change online myself, but there's a tail of businesses that are trying to tell me it's impossible to either change my email or delete my account, forcing me to escalate to departments that really shouldn't be having their time wasted with either problem.

mattmanser 7y ago
Well, you don't know that. It could be that developing proper processes, training and tools to handle it costs far more than the rare few times they need to pass it up to someone to manually change it in a DB.
- Marsymars 7y ago
  Yes, I get that, but these are large corporations where there doesn't even exist any way to "pass it up" to someone in IT from the standard CSR channels. e.g. one of them had $15B in revenue last year and an actual privacy office, which I guess will be my next step to contact.

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago

This seems very much like a 'water is wet' type of study. And to clarify, it's not really a study - the authors just interviewed some call center managers and came to the (pretty obvious conclusion to anyone who has ever called customer service) that companies put up barriers to getting refunds. I agree with other commenters, though, for me the issue is not often about getting a refund, but more often about getting the information I need to solve my problem.

williesleg 7y ago

When I hear someone from our of the country answer I always hang up. No exceptions. They never help, ever.

zebraflask 7y ago

Well, of course, this all makes perfect sense. If a company pushes out a bad product or service or other generally subpar what have you, the first line of defense is to make it as difficult as possible for customers to have any good resolution to their complaints.

DoctorOetker 7y ago

consider a total budget for customer service, why not hire 2 or more customer service subcontractors on the following contract: customer questions are randomly assigned, and money flows proportionally toward the company with the better customer satisfaction scores? any question a subcontractor has not enough information for will be between the customer service contractor and the original company, and they don't need to be afraid of insisting the original company resolve a real fundamental issue with the product as the other subcontractor faces the same issues, which has the side effect of the subcontractors summarizing a large number of complaints for the original companies product engineers etc consider how for a long time many manufacturers didn't want to spend the time and effort to fix some linux driver, not because they couldn't but because they didn't want to plough through 10k complaints or requests, of unknown similarity or difference, and having the original high wage engineers plough through them is uneconomical, so have the subcontractor summarize the issue concisely yet precisely

mlthoughts2018 7y ago
What subcontractor would accept this arrangement? I sure wouldn’t. It’s like an evil genie situation. You’re never going to define customer satisfaction metrics in a way that won’t end up being gamefied to circumvent the spirit of what you’re supposed to do to help customers in order to maximize some metrics. This issues can also be related to the company itself. What if there’s an undisclosed bug in your randomization process based on IP or time zone or something that tilts the satisfaction metrics via an almost impossible to detect skew in the customer distribution routed to subcontractor A instead of B? What if you the company introduce a policy or product change that makes customers unhappy even if the subcontractor is doing exactly what you asked them to do? Or what if subcontractors realize the only way to make people happy is to do something really expensive or unapproved by you?
- DoctorOetker 7y ago
  > .. skew in the customer distribution routed to subcontractor A instead of B? provably rolling a random dice is a solved problem, superstition that fluctuations in a cryptographically verifiable random coin flip would correlate with "pathologically dissatisfied customers" is just that: superstition. > What if you the company introduce a policy or product change that makes customers unhappy even if the subcontractor is doing exactly what you asked them to do? That would make the customers assigned to the other subcontractors equally unhappy, so the customer satisfaction feedback drop will be the same for the other competing subcontractor, and so the budget division will be unaffected, but still tilted proportional to the gross difference in performance between subcontractor A and B > Or what if subcontractors realize the only way to make people happy is to do something really expensive or unapproved by you? What do you mean? reverse engineer a driver and rewrite a better one?

nmstoker 7y ago

I hear anecdotally about these "levels" and it's an obvious strategy, but in my experience, I usually get paid back without escalation (that's not to say they aren't escalating the matter discretely on their side w/o passing me up a level). The only obvious way they might be masking it is if I have to call back another day but that doesn't seem like I get through to anyone differently than if I'd just called up (thus I suspect it would be level 1)

perl4ever 7y ago

I've found that email support varies wildly, and you don't get the quality you might expect. I've asked simple questions of a financial institution that I trust with most of my savings, and gotten responses that totally ignored everything I wrote except for a keyword or two, as if they were an Eliza-style AI. On the other hand, I emailed a question to my health insurer, and I got a completely sensible, intelligent, and helpful response. Even in person, I frequently ask a simple question and people act like I've got two heads. Sometimes the businesses they work for are objectively honest and competent, but somehow they can't answer a really basic question. Like the other day, I was replacing some fire extinguishers and I realized I had just signed off on new ones without understanding the UL rating. Granted, it wasn't that hard to find an explanation online after a few minutes, but someone who works for a business that sells them to everybody in the area should be able and willing to explain. I don't think this can all be economically rational optimization.

lotsofpulp 7y ago
A lender miscalculated my monthly loan payment, so I wrote up a nice email to them, attached an amortization spreadsheet, linked to a public google sheets in case they can’t download attachments, and attached a pdf showing them the calculations. It took 6 weeks and over 10 emails for them to fix it to the correct amortization. This is literally this company’s entire purpose, to calculate payment amounts, and they couldn’t take 20 seconds to use the PMT() function in a spreadsheet to see they had made a mistake. I forwarded the account of my experience to as many bosses at the company I could find and never heard back.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  Well, I understand it's a binary thing, that most people can't analyze anything they haven't seen before, and that most companies don't employ customer service reps who can, because they have better opportunities. That's why it was shocking to me that the health insurance company did have such people and a financial company didn't. I just gave up with the latter, no "10 emails fixed it".
- zaroth 7y ago

b_tterc_p 7y ago

I feel like in the past few years customer service has gotten much better for most companies. I have had reasonably concise and helpful calls with my bank, telecom provider, utilities, phone company, and one product company within the past year and they all went pretty well despite negative reputations for a few. Online chat windows seem to be the most effective for me. Curious if this resonates

toast0 7y ago
The online chat windows work pretty well for me, the written record usually means at least I don't need to repeat myself to every new person, and often the chat windows are tied to my account so I don't need to identify myself. And, it's much easier for me to multitask while waiting for a response, but we can have a quick back and forth when it gets to that part of the call. However, what has really helped the most is lowering my expectations. If the other person seems to understand what I'm asking, I'm satisfied, if not happy when they say it can't be done.

Animats 7y ago

Perhaps poor customer service should be considered an indicator that an antitrust breakup is needed. This isn't that far from European Union antitrust guidelines.[1] See Article 102, which has "limiting production, markets or technical development to the prejudice of consumers" This ties in with the EU warranty obligation.[3] A key point in EU law is that "competition" is encouraged for the benefit of the consumer. US antitrust law is based on protecting smaller sellers from big ones. Something to look at if Elizabeth Warren becomes president. [1] https://ec.europa.eu/competition/antitrust/overview_en.html https://ec.europa.eu/competition/antitrust/overview_en.html [2] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX:12008E102 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX:12... [3] https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/dealing-with-customers/consumer-contracts-guarantees/consumer-guarantees/index_en.htm https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/dealing-with-customers...

Proven 7y ago
> Perhaps poor customer service should be considered an indicator that an antitrust breakup is needed. No, it's an indicator that the government has successfully created enough barrier entries that market doesn't work well. Less regulation that "protects" customers and less government intrusion is the solution. It's incredible to me that someone would mention the EU as an example of how to do things. It's the worst place for customers and the amount of tax governments steal on the account of protecting consumers surely dramatically outweighs aggregate benefits of such large scale fraud schemes such as those in the EU. In the EU VAT is commonly 15-20%. Buy the same product or service anywhere else and you save 10-15%. Who in the world charges 10-15% for customer service? No one but the lazy and bloated European governments.
dantheman 7y ago
I wouldn't look to the EU for innovation or economic policy.
- anovikov 7y ago
  Exactly. I struggle to see in what we succeed here which is higher tech than making really good croissants and coffee. Even when we are, it usually happens in Eastern European states like Estonia who are definitely not drivers of economic policy.

Proven 7y ago

The title doesn't make any sense, and the lined article fails to make sense as well. If the customer service sucks to the point that it diminishes a product's or service's value, the customer looks for better value. It is only in sectors where the government obstructs competition (well, most of them these days) where it is possible to provide a shitty service and hang onto your customers. But that isn't because companies profit from providing shitty service but because they profit from barriers to entry created by the corrupt government.

twopens 7y ago

I spent several years in both Tier 1 and Tier 2 support for several companies. Generally speaking, I found companies that failed to provide a high level of support did so not because it was particularly profitable, but because they either A) Wanted to cut costs and off-shore as much of the operations as possible or B) Were struggling financially and unable to support their product Working as Tier 2 support for Apple I can tell you that I gave away free products (From the Apple Online Store) constantly. I required no approval for products $300 and under in value. The only caveat being that Apple did not give away ANY of its own products. Some days I would give away more money in free products than I made working that day. Apple is doing fantastic financially. When I worked for Frontier Communications (Who are currently being investigated on a few fronts for failing to maintain their network and refused to take questions from investors at their last quarterly earnings call) I was basically unable to help anyone who called in unless their problem was user error. Any customer who had an issue with something on our end was basically given the shaft. I've had much more middle of the road experiences as well, but those are the two polar opposites that I've had in my early working experience.

natmaka 7y ago

Your customer who struggled in order to have your product work tolerably will think twice before trying to switch to a competitor, as he doesn't want to once more live through hassles. You spare money on service/support, and the customer is less prone to abandon you. Yay. A competitor offering a better service may seem dangerous because his customers will recommend him. However he as to sell for a higher price, therefore most customers will not consider his product. Moreover most of his customers will be picky (easily by the shitty support provided by you and your pairs) or dumb/lazy (totally unable/unwilling to think/act usefully by themselves), and their demands will only grow, leading him tto somewhat reduce his margins (and you will buy him, because he as less customers and less profit per customer) or raise his prices (and enter some high-end/luxury (<=> small) niche).

pjc50 7y ago

See also http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2012/01/21/the-politics-of-call-centres-part-one/ http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2012/01/21/the-politics-of-...

DayDollar 7y ago

What i do not get, is why there is not a "Lawyer"-Layer between customers and companys shirking customers-service. Basically you dont get to worry and put up with what is essentially a denial on service attack on a person, and these people get you whatever you want if they can and fight for your rights, if necessary with legal actions. If they want a war of attrition, a war of attrition they could get. Also likeable, social customers, who get shafted, become basically anti-evanglists of a brand and product. Im pretty sure, if marketing would do some research, these "Warning"-network effects would show up. I had several family dinners, where one or another would tell horror stories about a product they tryied and these are shunned afterwards. Only companys who can get away with it are entrenched network effect companys like google.

aksss 7y ago

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