On my way to the grocery store, I was listening to NPR/MPR per usual. They were playing a podcast called On Point hosted by Meghna Chakrabarti, and the episode was entitled: Is customer service bad on purpose? It’s about whether or not customer service was worse these days than, say, a decade ago. My immediate impulsive answer was, “Fuck yeah!”
I had noticed in the last several years, the ability to get a human being on the phone for customer service was nigh near impossible. There are tips and tricks to get around this, but companies were finding ways to get around those tips and tricks. It’s frustrating as hell, especially when it’s a company or service that does not have a competitor. For example, the government. I had to talk to someone in the local government about my healthcare plan, and I had to wait on the phone for three hours to actually talk to a human being. That is unconscionable. And this was before the pandemic! I’m sure it’s only gotten worse since then, but as Meghna said with such passion, I go to great lengths so I don’t have to talk to someone on the phone.
This all came to a head recently when I ordered a print from RKG. They are a British company, so they carefully chose an American shipping company for us Americans that seemed like a good company on paper. The company promised express shipping and the cost was half of the actual print. I don’t mind paying for good service, otherwise I wouldn’t have bought it.
The tracking told me that it reached Cincinnati, OH in the morning of the day it was supposed to reach me. Damn. I looked it up again, expecting the drive to be roughly 6 hours, but it’s 11. I’m sure I did it the day it was supposed to arrive here, too.
It did not reach my house that night. Fine. It was supposed to and I paid for it to reach my house that night, but fine. I would wait for the next morning and–still in Cincinnati. What? I mean, what? I went online to the delivery company’s website and plugged in my tracking number. Yup. Stuck in Cincinnati. Hm. That could be a rom-com.
It didn’t arrive on Friday. Or Saturday. I dug a bit deeper on the website to see if I could actually talk with someone. I could in chat on the website! They asked for my tracking number, which I gave them. “Your package is in Cincinnati. Would you like to track another package?”
TELL ME SOMETHING THAT I DON’T KNOW. I already know my package is in Cincinnati. I want to know why it wasn’t on it’s way to me. Everyone else in the Discord were getting their packages–including the Ameriacns. One of them also had their package in Cincinnati on Thursday as did I, except he got his that afternoon.
Nothing the next day. Idid more dgging. I could not find a phone number that was for customer service on the website. I could find no way to actually talk to a human being. I gave it the old college try, but if it’s on the website, it’s well hidden.
The print came on Monday, four days after it was supposed to EXPRESSLY be there. To be clear, I would have been fine with that if the company didn’t tout how EXPRESS they were. And, once they were not EXPRESS, had a way for me to actually track what was happening to my package other than festering somewhere in Cincinnati.
In the podcast episode, one of the guests was Jeannie Walters, the founder and CEO of Experience Investigators, which looks into customer exerience. She explained that for the customer, they start getting angry when they feel that they are not being heard and also when they feel they have no control of the situation. She said that when she told people what she did, there were three kinds of compaines that irritated them the most. You can probably guess which three. Airlines, cable, and phone.
She also mentioned that their main goal was to upsell, so they pretty much ignored your issues and just pushed stuff you neither wanted nor needed. Which only made the customer angrier. The call center workers had to follow strict scripts and were penalized for straying. It didn’t matter if the customer was asking something that was not on their script–the worker had to yank it back that way.
The other guest, Jared Spool, founded Center Centre, which is a consulting firm for user experience. He’s a former professor from Tufts University in the School of Engineering Management. He mentioned how the layers between us and the direct provider were more than we realized. He also mentioned that many of the ways things are handled these days were put in place years ago and no longer applicable.
It’s frustrating as hell. The point of customer service now is not to actually help the customer–if it ever was. i try tobe chil when I call in because as the podcast emphasized, the people at the call center are mere cogs in the machine and do not deserve the shit they get dumped on them. A few people who were in the business called in and said how terrible it was to have to deal with entitled customers. But, also, how much worse customer service has gotten–which made it more difficult for them to do their job as well.
One guy said part of the problem was that everything was siloed here so he could only answer a very narrow slice of questions. He wanted to help people, but he couldn’t. He also didn’t undeerstand why there needed to be 10 managers who sat around doing nothing. He blamed capitalism, and he wasn’t wrong.
Naked capitalism has shown its ugly face, and I think it’s just going to get worse. There’s no reason for companies to rein it in, especially not theh monopolies.
I will say, the few times I’ve had to call Amazon, they were really good at taking care of my problem. One time, it was an issue with a food delivery. They promptly took care of it without a murmur. Same with a package that did not arrive when it was supposed to. I talked to an actual person both times, and they were so pleasant as they helped me. And actually helpful! It’s funny how little I require from a rep in order to consider it a successful interaction. Also, I don’t yell at reps because it’s not there fault. I did once, but that was because I had been waiting on the phone for two hours, got transferred and the phone hung up on the transfer–another pet peeve of mine. when I called back, I allowed the frustration to show in my voice. So I didn’t actually yell, but I was terse with the person who did not deserve it (as it was a different person).
Look. I just want a way to talk to someone and get the thing I need fixed–fixed. I really don’t think that’s too much to ask.