Customer service has turned into a joke

O.k. what part

yes you can take care of that with me

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means you get transfered to another department for service.

I hate being on hold for ever and I hate that fact one hand doesn't watch what the other had is doing. The end result is wasted time, money and frustration... : :evil: :evil: :evil: :evil: :evil:

yeah, it's gotten terrible, especially with isp/cable/wireless providers. When we moved recently, our provider make 6 distinct errors in canceling and opening our new account. In the end, i had to convince them that they fucked up and it took two hours of phone time.

maybe we should threaten to charge them for our time that's wasted... send them a 30 day invoice.

:grin:

reason i got rid of my at&t internet. biggest bunch of idiots ive ever seen.
cant stand talking to someone for hours that can barely speak english, or getting transfered 10 times.

I had a customer service horror story a few months ago.

My DSL line which is shared with my telephone service became intermittent. My telephone worked but the line was also intermittently noisy.

I called up and got passed back and forth like a hot potato between two uncoordinated service groups. The DSL crowd mostly focussed on modem and software problems, while the line quality group was all about "Do you have dial tone, does it work". etc.

I was convinced it was a line problem but when they scoped my line from the switch they got a reading appox the distance to my house and didn't have fine enough resolution to see a line problem a couple hundred feet short of my drop when probing from thousands of feet away.

When the line guy called me at pre java dark oclock in the morning my line wasn't noisy and I made the mistake of admitting that it wasn't noisy at that moment. He said I didn't have a line problem and closed the repair ticket.

After much getting passed around and only after I made another bad line report, I lied and got a line repairman out to my house. When he scoped the line from my end he could measure a problem a few hundred feet away. He said he measured an open where the squirrel had chewed away the insulation and let water in. I find an open hard to believe since my phone still worked and you need two circuits for POTS, but perhaps a short would explain the attenuated DSL and noisy line.

I had to be very careful when reporting my problem to lie and not mention the intermittent DSL problem (which it really was), or faster than you can say Bangalore, I'm talking to someone in almost perfect English about software and resetting my modem.

JR

Oh my yes. The one where I nearly started screaming was Mr Bakshi (or whatever) having me go through 20-30 minutes of cable verifications, modem resets, etc. etc., despite my insistence that nothing had been altered.

After doing all of this he congratulates me, and says Now I can tell you that we are having line problems and they are working on it!

Then he asks me to be sure and put in a good word if/when they call me to see how much I liked their outstanding service. I kid you not.

i agree. one method that helps though... i have speaker phone function. so i dial ,press the appropriate buttons, and get in queue. at this point i turn on speaker phone and go about my business. as long as i'm in ear shot of the phone i'm ok. annoying? yeah , but this helps a bit.

[quote author="seavote"]i agree. one method that helps though... i have speaker phone function. so i dial ,press the appropriate buttons, and get in queue. at this point i turn on speaker phone and go about my business. as long as i'm in ear shot of the phone i'm ok. annoying? yeah , but this helps a bit.[/quote]

I do that too but still wastes time to a degree and frustrates you. Today was on hold where every 2-3 seconds the muzak was interrupted with

all of our service people are busy please hold for the next available person

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I don't mind the hold music... I leave it on and continue work but when every 2-3 seconds there is that annoying voice it's a whole other level of annoying.

[quote author="pucho812"]O.k. what part

yes you can take care of that with me

Click to expand...

means you get transfered to another department for service.

I hate being on hold for ever and I hate that fact one hand doesn't watch what the other had is doing. The end result is wasted time, money and frustration... : :evil: :evil: :evil: :evil: :evil:[/quote]

Customer service in the UK is the same I sent off for a ten pack of 650MB cds for my old SCSI drive and a few days later I recieved a large box in the post with 4 spools of 50 cds and all were the 700MB version!!!!

I made a phone call to london and the person on the other end of the phone was either russian or eastern european who didn't have a grasp of the english language.

Eventually I managed to speak to a person who was english and rectified the problem in 2 minutes.

I guess the seller must be employing cheap labour from eastern europe and It sounded as if it was not the first time people had recieved the wrong goods :roll: :roll:

I have also had problems with my ISP as well and all customer service calls to India and a lot of the time when they cannot fix a problem they say I will just ask someone else in the call center and they put the hang up the phone, so I have to call again wasting more time and money down!!

There was documentary on UK TV shown by the BBC on foreign / offshore call centers and it turned out that when they ask you how you rate their customer service they were not filling then in.
The staff were fraudulently filling them in and the call center and staff were getting an extra bonus if they did this!!

Yeah , once they have your money ,
kicked out the door with no pants on .

All the voice mail hell systems that make it near
impossible to speak with anyone live

another trick i've used. sometimes sucessfully! if the voice male system has voice recognition,speak some jibberish when asked a question. sometimes you will be fowarded to a real person as the system can not recogonize your response. not that you wont have to wait for that live person,but you can sometimes skip a few voice mail steps

that works as well as hitting Zereo when they ask you to press a number to select a menu item. Good chance you get a liver person to screw up your business as opposed to waiting through menus for 10 minutes and getting your business screwed...

or you get a live person who proceeds to transfer you right back into
voicemail / directory Hell

Today one credit card's teller 3 times tried to figure out how to spell the same word in my company name, web site URL, and an e-mail address... Though, each time I tried to explain that it is still the same word, with the same spelling...

I haven't had Verizon DSL at the studio for close to three weeks. Massive incompetance. And I have to wait another week. Incredible.

Chase bank just changed all their ATM's so they read the checks directly instead of filling out a deposit slip. The only problem is that it doesn't work. It won't even recognize machine printed checks. And there is no way to manually enter the check amounts. If it doesn't recognize the check there is no way to deposit it! A bank that won't allow you to deposit money. Unbelievable!

Chase is at the very top of my bank s^&*list and there are few signs of it being surpassed, although Bank of America is actively vying.

[quote author="bcarso"]Chase is at the very top of my bank s^&*list and there are few signs of it being surpassed, although Bank of America is actively vying.[/quote]

So, you've dealt with Chase's inscrutable "Research Department," who ultimately decide everything to do with your account yet you cannot contact them in any way, and the customer service reps can't contact them either?

Fuckers.

-a

[quote author="Gold"]I haven't had Verizon DSL at the studio for close to three weeks. Massive incompetance. And I have to wait another week. Incredible.

Chase bank just changed all their ATM's so they read the checks directly instead of filling out a deposit slip. The only problem is that it doesn't work. It won't even recognize machine printed checks. And there is no way to manually enter the check amounts. If it doesn't recognize the check there is no way to deposit it! A bank that won't allow you to deposit money. Unbelievable![/quote]

The machine has a camera inside that transmits the picture to India where bank tellers read them on the screen. You know, level of education there is not so high so every teller can read well...

All of the Indian call centers I've talked to have better english language skills than many here. I prefer talking to an Indian rep who may be able to help me than listening to hold music for an hour.

My problems have been with the structure or design of the customer service experience. My phone line-DSL experience was a bad case of hot potato as I got bounced back and forth with neither group taking ownership of my problem.

JR

When I was living in Los Angeles back in the 1980's I had one local phone service provider (GTE) and an AT&T long-distance/international plan. I noticed that the phone bill from GTE had the AT&T total added in on it, then added sales tax. -Problem is that the AT&T bill already had sales tax added in on it.

So it was double taxation.

I called GTE to ask about it.

GTE said it was AT&T's problem, that they shouldn't be adding tax to it.

I called AT&T to ask about it.

AT&T said they HAVE to charge tax and are required to do so by law, and that GTE shouldn't be charging tax a second time on that portion of the bill, so it's their fault.

This went back and forth for three of four months. To me it was a total of maybe a hundred dollars in excess paid taxes (I made a lot of international calls), but there must have been thousands of people in California getting charged double-tax every month... for years. Perhaps HUNDREDS of thousands of dollars every month; almost certainly millions every year.

Eventually we ended up with a three-way phone conference, with the heads of customer service for both AT&T and GTE on the phone. -Every party on the call agreed that I should not have to pay the amount which I was being billed, everybody agreed that there WAS a problem, and yet there was apparently no way to resolve it: -Both phone companies insisted that the OTHER company was causing the problem, and neither could correct or adjust my bill, since this was taxation, and there was no provision for ANY kind of "discretionary adjustment" where taxation is concerned... -such an idea was horrifyingly close to fraud, apparently.

The laughable thing was that every service representative answered the phone with the same speech: "Hello, my name is [insert name here] and it's my goal to give you excellent service today, how may I help you?". They also ended every call with "Thank you for calling, and was I able to provide you with excellent service today?". -When the answer was "no", they then had to ask why, and fill out a report on why the customer wasn't satisfied. -Of course, my story was that I can't really describe the inability to resolve a billing error which nobody disputes as "excellent". It doesn't "excel" in any manner whatsoever. It doesn't even make me happy. It is therefore not "excellent". After taking the details, the irritating thing was that they then had to wind up the call once again, with the speech: "Thank you for calling, and was I able to provide you with excellent service today?". -Of course, I'd say "not really" again, and on more than one occasion, the process began a second time...

Finally I left California.

I couldn't stand the "excellent service" any more.

And this was probably before Pucho was born! -I doubt that bad customer service is a particularly new invention. :wink:

Keith