This is just a coincidence, but I happened to run across two similar stories today. The first is about a guy who had to replace his credit card due to fraudulent charges and therefore wanted to make sure that all his auto-payments weren't automatically updated:
He said Bank of America told him his credit-card account couldn’t be removed from the card updater program.... Bank of America said automatically updating card information is a customer convenience, and it works with customers to resolve issues. A spokesman told The Wall Street Journal that it has now removed Evans’s credit-card account from the updater program.
The second story is about a guy in Chicago whose property taxes suddenly skyrocketed because his $200,000 house had been newly assessed at over a million dollars:
Lloyd initially attempted to resolve the issue with the Cook County Tax Assessor's Office, but wasn’t taken seriously. “I told them that I had a substantial increase, and they were like, ‘everybody's taxes increase,’" he recounted.
However, after Lloyd got in touch with FOX 32 Chicago, it contacted the Assessor's Office and discovered the exorbitant tax bill was indeed an error, as Lloyd had claimed. "This property was given an incorrect assessment due to a permit that was unintentionally applied to the property,” a representative from the office stated.
One of these examples is a private company and the other is a public agency. Both unfolded the same way. The initial response was, basically, "bugger off," but when the press got involved it suddenly turned out that impossible things were possible after all.
But why? Why is it so hard to get "customer service" organizations to even take queries seriously in the first place? It's one thing to make a mistake, or for a poorly trained rep to have a hard time solving a problem. But that doesn't excuse the frequency with which people are simply told to take it or leave it without the problem even being looked at.
In the retail biz it's pretty common for customer service to be not just good, but maybe even more forgiving than it should be. It's considered to be a minimum requirement for a giant, faceless chain trying to gain customer trust. So why is it so uncommon everywhere else? Less competition, I suppose, along with higher switching costs. Still, I find it surprising that so few non-retailers even try to attract business with legitimately generous customer service. Everyone claims to have great customer service, of course, but almost no one does. Why?
To those with the sharpened pencils and green eye shades, customer service is a cost to be minimized...
+1. Many call centers time the calls, and penalize reps who take too long to actually help customers. Getting people off the phone ASAP is the goal.
And it's even better when pesky customers can be kept from taking even a second of a human rep's time by trapping them in an impossible-to-navigate automated voicemail-jail and then subjecting them to an hour of hold time (during which they are bombarded with ads).
Note to Kevin: they don't WANT to help you; they want you to give them money and shut up and go away.
In my experience the goal is to keep you from talking to a human by trapping you in an automated response loop.
Customer service has no effect on the daily stock price. Therefore according to Milton Friedman and Jack Welsh, any company that spends a dime on customer service is cheating its stockholders.
KD
you ARE aware that if we don't pay attention to our finances companies and yes some government agencies will take advantage of us, claiming blissful ignorance.
Here's one for you. The price of lumber (wholesale) has plummeted to pre pandemic levels. but talk to the folks at Lowes, or Home Depot etc and THEY wi) tell you "oh, this is because when we bought the lumber months ago the price was higher". They are slow to lower prices but will raise them based upon a rumored problem in the supply chain
This reminds me of a post of Kevin's from some months ago that I forgot to complain about at the time. He put up a chart showing very close correlation between the price of oil and the price of gasoline to debunk the notion that oil companies were using rising and falling oil prices to extract more profit.
The correlation indeed looked excellent, but the time scale (decades) made it impossible to see the only relevant feature: the differing lag between response to a rise and response to a fall. There is huge money hiding in that crack.
I would think part of it would be the sheer volume of BS customer service people have to deal with. For every legitimate concern there may be 100 calls about nothing, or people who just want to ruin someone’s day.
I think this is accurate. And yet, I think there is probably a better way to deal with it.
The reason is money, as above. Serving customers well requires spending more money.
Honestly, I would welcome an AI chatbot that could take care of most simple problems because it would reduce costs so much, and prevent me sitting on hold listening to that godawful crap they call music (probably also generated by AI).
I would hope that this would let them hire fewer reps, who could focus on actual, real problems, since the cookie-cutter stuff was already handled.
Meanwhile, though, I think there have to be thousands of people a year who call and say their tax bill is wrong, and are mistaken about it.
You're ignoring the professionals like trump who call and complain about every single assessment, even the ones that are mistakenly too low. People always talk about how the government can throw infinite resources at cases and disputes, but Trump knows he can always outspend (and routinely does) the government to win his issues.
The problem with the AI chatbot solution is that, yes, they are artificial, but not all that intelligent.
It's not that customer service reps are poorly trained exactly. It's that they are trained and required to read canned responses to the questions asked and issues raised. Beyond that they are helpless.
Exactly! It's the problem with getting large numbers of people to work on one big project. They all have to be on the same page. Individual anything is irrelevant, so even the smartest, best intentioned people wind up doing stupid and nasty things. The alternative is that nothing works at all.
In a society with high wages - which I believe describes the contemporary United States - the most expensive thing is another human being's attention.
Part of it is the lack of competition and higher switching costs, as Kevin says. In the extreme (e.g. when dealing with government agencies) there is no alternative.
For private companies I think there's a causal relationship between service quality and customer acquisition costs. Banks don't really spend much to acquire customers (when was the last time you saw an ad from an established bank?). Same with "free" web services. Enterprise companies spend a fair amount of money getting new (large) customers so their service tends to be better and more responsive.
And of course most (all?) of the MBA's in the home office making the rules probably have never worked in customer service or on a sales floor.
"If we reduce the wage cost on the floor to near zero profits will sky rocket!"
"What, merchandise will walk out the door? And if the shelves are not stocked we can't sell the product?"
"Why didn't anyone tell me this?"
The credit card companies have way too much power.
I went through this thing a couple of times -- as most people did, I imagine -- where there was some fraudulent charge for $12 from Brazil on my card, and as a result I cancelled that card, thus causing me to spend 4 hours switching the automatic charges to the new card. I wound up switching card companies. Surely the card companies know that's a main reason for switching and thus do everything they can to keep you in their fold, such as auto-updating the recurring charges.
Nobody ever got fired for shitty customer service. People HAVE, however, been fired for devoting to many resources to things that don't make a profit. Like customer service. As far as public service goes, well, you get what you pay for. Spending money on service means less available for tax cuts. Cutting through the public shitty service is what legislators are for.
But why? Why is it so hard to get "customer service" organizations to even take queries seriously in the first place?
Kevin's usual, valuable sense of skepticism is absent on this issue. I think we really can't draw conclusions like the above without asking something like "compared to what?"
Is customer service worse now than it was in the 1990s? In the 1950s? Maybe! But how would we know? Is customer service worse in the United States than in other countries? Maybe! But how would we know?
Back in the 1960s, the comedian Lily Tomlin did a whole shtick as a telephone operator ending with the line, "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company." Did Bell Telephone perfect lousy customer service or did they just move it into the 20th century?
Remember that you had to talk to customer service to make any telephone call for a long while. Finally, an undertaker got pissed when customer service routed his calls to a competitor, so he invented the automatic switching exchange. Imagine customer service that bad.
First off, just try to find a number for customer service and if you do, I double dare you to actually get anyone to answer. Companies want your business and that's it. Period.
From my own personal experience, Bank America was a big time looser. I dropped them years ago after using them forever. They were next to useless.
I also had a BoA account for many years, and also closed it just a couple years ago because of crappy customer service. I remember trying to deal with an issue via the website, getting frustrated, calling their phone number, getting even more frustrated, and then finally walking in to the local bank branch to talk about the issue with a personal banker. The banker had to get on the phone with BoA himself to deal with the thing - and they kept him on hold for over 20 minutes. He finally told me, "Give me your phone number. I'll call you after I get an answer."
To his credit, he actually did call me an hour or so later with an answer. But that was the day I decided to leave BoA. They treat their own front-line employees just as badly as they treat their customers.
This used to be common with the airlines.
"... The initial response was, basically, "bugger off," but when the press got involved it suddenly turned out that impossible things were possible after all."
A little selection bias here if you only consider the cases that were so bad the press got interested.
When I was in the pizza biz, I loved customer complaints. They were almost always easily solved (free pizza usually, money back sometimes) and people would think so much better of the business! I sometimes felt like we should occasionally fuck up on purpose so we could make it good.
I'm always shocked when a restaurant doesn't make goood a screw up.
As someone who has worked in customer service, the main answer to this question is the low usability of customer service systems, which are always a cobbled together mess without good documentation. The agents get lost in the software and legitimately don't understand everything they are looking at.
My health-insurance payment portal was never tested on a Safari website; the identify-the-humans box is so small as to be nearly extinct, making it impossible to update payment information.
I have complained about the access several times, it's moved since my complaints, but it's obvious nobody's running the interface on different web browsers to make sure it functions properly.
Consider a tool like Choosy. You set it as your default browser, load a few browser extensions and it automatically shows different websites in different browsers for you. I am not making this up. It's a way of dealing with enshittification in action.
For the examples you gave, there are probably a couple of factors:
1) The credit card company has set up a policy that is designed to make the vast majority of customers happy. Their customer services staff probably turns over yearly, so they can't actually give them the thorough training necessary to allow them to make a lot of exceptions/changes. The cost savings from making 99.9% of customers happy while paying little for customer service is well worth losing that 0.1% of customers who need something more.
2) Government agencies deal with a lot of cranks and stubborn ignoramuses.
Dealing with that can wear you down in customer service, and some may just lump everyone making a particular complaint into the idiot category even though 1% of the time they're not actually idiots and have a real point.
Finally, in some industries really bad customer service can be quite profitable. Healthcare is one. Most clinics will not refund overcharges unless you call repeatedly. If they can bill both the patient and the insurance, and get paid by both, you better believe they'll hold onto that money as long as they can. It's a strategy that is sometimes written about in trade journals in healthcare management - and I've experienced it myself.
governments also tend to be massively underfunded and subject to requirements that further limit their effectiveness as customer service organizations. the vast majority of government websites in 2024 are barely-usable trash compared to their private-sector counterparts, and I have to think much of the reason why is that they simply aren't provided with the kinds of budgets that allow them to hire front- and back-end software engineers who actually know how to build this stuff to modern standards, to say nothing of product managers to make sure the engineers' work has the end-user in mind or UI/UX designers who can make things that are pleasurable to use.
it's not exactly a surprise that an organization whose funding is that bare-bones would also be incapable of hiring people to troubleshoot citizens' problems who aren't just irascible paper-pushing drones.
Where are you based? I've dealt with a lot of wretched private company web sites and a lot of good government ones. Even the much maligned Obamacare site works pretty well now given that it tries to make our insane health insurance system navigable.
My biggest beef is that as most consumer products are made in China to be sold at the lowest possible price almost nobody stocks replacement parts. I have probably gone through a 1/2 dozen string trimmers due to the fact that you simply can't buy some 25 cent part that has worn out. If it wears out within the warranty period, you can get an entire new unit, but not parts. I also have a Nike golf bag where one of the fairly unique zipper pulls fell off a few weeks after the end of the 1 year warranty. Emailed Nike, and the basic response was "terribly sorry, fuck off".
others have pretty much hit the nail on the head but i'll add this: in retail, customer service is a required cost of doing business. you basically cannot succeed in a brick-and-mortar retail store while having a reputation for being outright hostile to customers. if you've sunk all this money into having customer service anyway, you might as well make it *decent* customer service, because the money you lose in questionable returns and so forth pales in comparison to the amount you're already spending on the labor to deal with them.
but the calculus is totally different for a credit card company, a purely online retailer, or a government entity. in those enterprises, success is partially-to-wholly uncoupled from the customer experience. if you *can* get by with 99% of customers serving themselves via the automated systems you've set up, it's very easy to convince yourself that it doesn't really matter if the other 1% who have problems requiring actual human attention end up feeling screwed and furious at you.
I might actually have a bit of personal perspective on this issue. My tech job is not classified as customer support, but it does sometimes involve direct communication with clients that are facing very specific situations.
And the problems almost always boil down to some form of user error or user system malfunction.
One of the main challenges, in fact, is accurately identifying those very few occasions when there actually is a situation that the company itself can and should address constructively.
But the problems are so often on the part of the client, and the issues so often should and could have easily been solved by the users themselves, that after a while company representatives just reflexively start approaching every troubleshooting situation with those dynamics in mind.
yes, but that's only because the company is run in a way that doesn't lavish resources on customer service. if they did, "just throw the customer a bone even though the screwup is probably their fault" would be the default response, even if it weren't something as resource-intensive as "thoroughly investigate every single customer issue and get to the bottom of whatever is troubling them, because those 1% with real problems are invaluable even if the other 99% are dummies."
you don't see brick-and-mortar stores constantly fighting with customers about their problems with merchandise, arguing that they obviously misused the product! most of the time they just...take it back and eat the lost revenue. but the MBAs who run businesses at even greater scale than B&M retailers have just made it a foundational assumption that they will not spend money on the amount of labor that would be necessary to operate the company in this fashion.
So if a customer (or poster) complains about other posters who say "you can make thousands of USD per week just go to this website"
OR
"We want the ability to upvote or down vote a post"
OR
"We want to be able to block a poster"
AND the owner does nothing
Is that bad customer service?
Just curious
We're not customers.
At least, I'm not, because I don't pay to participate here. Do you?
Same reason as why healthcare funding in America is so broken: screening against the most costly customers.
Among people who contact customer service, probably most have legitimate concerns they want addressed. But then there are those who are "problem" customers who want elevated service, and companies don't want those customers.
And even among customers with legitimate concerns, the ones who don't bother following up are "better" customers than those who do, at least up to the point where they decide to take their business elsewhere.
So, as with private health insurance, it's a balancing act between driving away customers you don't want and losing customers you do want. Probably a general rule is that if a product or service is competing mainly on price, the more they are willing to lose good customers in order to drive out the bad.
The cable company has a box on the telephone pole across the street from my bedroom window. It has three LED lights on it, one which seems to blink red when there's something amiss with the box or local system; I don't know, I am not a cable TV customer.
But the blinking-red light is troublesome to me, I get severe migraine, and can't filter it out sometimes. During a year where they were particularly bad (before a new very helpful medication,) I called several times and asked if they could move the box, and explained why. Nothing for the longest time, and then the new medication and I forgot.
But recently I noticed that the last time they were working on the poles, they rotated the box so that the lights face the empty lot, not the street and my bedroom window.
Now, I'm not even a customer. But somebody did make a note, and when they had a team out working, they did fix the problem So I know hope.
A lot of people hit the nail on the head. Customer service costs money, good customer service costs more. The costs of customer service don't result in higher stock prices for major companies and the people running the major companies are almost McKinsey MBA types or put in place by PE types, which only care about the line going up and only evaluate the business based on the spreadsheet. So, to raise the stock price you have to cut costs, and customer service doesn't generate revenue, so it gets cut, underfunded, or outsourced.
I actually think that something you and others have been missing is how this ties in to the "vibecession." The economy in terms of broad statistics has been doing good, but for most people I'd wager their experience is basically this but on a wider scale. They pay more for goods and services that are of worse quality and a lower amount and it's patently obvious that the companies selling those things think of customers as something to be tolerated. Deal with that long enough and you'll probably think that the economy is shit even if wages for some are up and the stock market is doing well. Look at the stories of how workers and customers felt when businesses were taken over by a PE firm and now imagine that almost every well known business is being run on similar logic.
I'll go with the enshitification of everything: https://www.ft.com/content/6fb1602d-a08b-4a8c-bac0-047b7d64aba5
Also, this is a great opportunity to warn everyone to stay away from Google Fi for mobile service. The service is great, but the customer service is the worst public service I have ever had with any company. The final straw was after buying a new phone through _their_ online store and the hotspot not working I spent a month in email back and forth and phone calls and never got the simple thing I wanted: a replacement phone. And I experimented with getting the cheapest phone they sold, so this was only a $200 phone retail.
We've now switched to Verizon, but I'm also pretty sure we will experience bad service because of the aforementioned enshitification of everything.
"In the retail biz it's pretty common for customer service to be not just good, but maybe even more forgiving than it should be."
Not if you retail outside of Orange County. There are plenty of stores where customer service sucks. Walmart checking receipts at the exit like everyone in the store is a thief. Target not allowing any exchanges, just returns, so when you buy something on sale and it's the wrong size/color/whatever, you need to return it and then re-buy it at full price. CVS and Walgreens putting entire aisles under lock and key with no personnel anywhere nearby to fetch items. Grocery stores having only 1 full-service lane open, so that people with heaping carts full of stuff flood into self-checkout and delay everyone. All of these I've experienced in just the last week here in Northern Virginia, and none are "good customer service" in my opinion.
Two examples proves customer service sucks? Yes, I encounter bad customer service now and then but my experience is that service is almost always in the range of neutral to positive. Negative experiences are overwhelmingly with personnel who are swamped with work or dealing with unreasonably aggressive or angry customers.
It's all about incentives. To a for-profit business, customer service is a cost center that doesn't have a clear relationship to profits, so it's always among the first things to get cut when squeeze time comes. In the government, unless someone is watching closely and holding bureaucrats accountable to ensure that citizens with complaints get treated well, no one has any incentive to do more work than the minimum necessary to look busy. Also, individual customer service reps get emotionally worn out from listening to people complain all the time, and then they lose compassion and start telling everybody to F off unless the boss holds them accountable - and if the boss has no incentive to make customer service good either, accountability won't happen. The combination of emotional exhaustion and lousy pay leads to high turnover, making it even worse.
tl;dr you only get good customer service if the person in charge deliberately chooses to make it a priority. Otherwise it inevitably deteriorates.
Because they don't have Sam, of course. And most calls aren't "pocket dials".....
Neither of these are particularly good customer service has gone to hell stories. The former is a simple policy change and the latter sounds like a hard to catch issue that neither the home owner or the typical clerk was going to recognize.
The credit card thing was a change in policy. Until maybe five or ten years ago, when you had a new card issued, you had to contact everyone who had automatic payments and update them. I had a whole spreadsheet full, and every three to five years my card would be compromised and I'd have to do 10-20 updates, mainly online but a few by phone.
The new policy is probably a response to customer complaints. The credit card companies do the updates for you if there have been regular automatic payments active. For a lot of people, this is a big win. The downside is that you can't use your card to shuck an unwanted automatic payment as one could in the past. You can still contest that charge, and that usually makes it go away, but you have to wait for the charge and contest it.
This isn't a customer service problem. This is a new policy that actually makes things easier for a lot of people, particularly when their card is compromised and a new one issued.
The property tax thing strikes me as weird since in our state we get a notice of tax change months before the new taxes take effect and are given a simple form and a phone number to challenge it. There are also phone numbers for old people, disabled people, and so on to access programs to limit their tax bill or find help paying it. I've only had to contest once, but it turned out that housing prices have really gone up here. I confirmed it on Zillow. I could quibble, but it wouldn't change my assessment much.
Why didn't customer service at the tax office catch the permit? There are any number of reasons, but clerks at the office have to deal with the data they are displayed. Odds are that wrong address permit filing showed up with some innocuous code that could have been legitimate. It's interesting that it wasn't on the new adjustment or billing statement. Of course, it could have been, but the person complaining might not have caught it anyway.
I have my own customer service stories, but in general, I find that a collaborative friendly approach usually gets me what I want or at leaves me in a better position. Of course, when my satellite internet went down, I traced a full graph of twenty customer service agents complete with several loops before the account termination guy mentioned that they had totally reprogrammed the satellite and that my modem was obsolete. Apparently, the rest of customer service hadn't been told this and were grateful when I called and informed them.
Customer service is NEVER allowed to say "I'm sorry, it looks like we made a mistake."
Everything else flows from that.