I won't deny many companies are playing this game of skimping as much as they can get away with, and I despise this practice. There's also the other side of the fence though: customers who are just a resource drain.
I've recently been involved in some customer support efforts, and there are customers who are just unreasonable. They'll demand to have their cake, eat it too, and even get a new one. For the nuisance that a completely made up problem caused them. A problem that wouldn't even be your fault if it had been real.
They are a vast minority, but they spoil it for everyone. They consume your time and especially your team's morale. There is only so much bullshit a support agent can take before getting fed up with it and degrading their service to subsequent customers.
Now the organization has to figure out a way to detect those customers early enough to prevent them from screwing up everything for everyone. But false positives are very expensive: get one wrong and it becomes a PR nightmare.
Furthermore, if you try to give the best possible support, you must empower your agents to act. They can now screw up and even get your company in legal trouble. Good training reduces this risk, but humans making calls means errors will be made eventually.
In the end, reducing support to the bare minimum possible appears a reasonable option for many companies: it is the easiest to implement, it reduces legal/PR risks, and it has a very measurable and consistent effect (how many people stop buying/using your service after failing to get support). If that number is low enough, it just doesn't make economical sense to try to provide good support, which is a very hard endeavor for the reasons mentioned above.
It's also possible, though, that companies are inadvertently training customers to be "bad customers" with the games they play around retention.
Consider the example of the AT&T customer in the article. The agent said there was "nothing she could do" until right up to the moment when the customer was switching. It's now common knowledge that this is basically the best way to get a deal, so many people skip the whole "Can you please give me a discount?" and instead go straight to the combative "Just close my account" first, as that's often the only way to get a deal.
This exact thing happened to me yesterday. Was trying to get Verizon to reverse a recent $20 rate increase due to a "customer loyalty discount" that automatically got removed.
I spent 47 minutes going around in circles with the rep, politely explaining that I did not wish to change my plan, or even get my bill lowered to the current promo rates which are about $30 less than what I'm paying for the exact same service. She would not budge, and offered me all kinds of crappy options such as entering into a new 2-year lock in contract, or removing ALL HD channels from my TV lineup.
Finally I threw in the towel and said, "I guess I just have to cancel this, I'm sorry". She immediately said, "Wait, let me see... hmm, Ok yes there does seem to be an offer here where I can extend your loyalty discount for another year. I'll go ahead and do that." Magic. Just like that.
I asked her why we had to play an hour long cat-and-mouse game to get this done. She had no explanation.
Seems like it's another form of price-segmentation. Just like some people take the time to cut and collect coupons, some people will spend the time on a 20 minute hold to spend another 20 minutes wrestling with a disempowered customer service representative, to spend another 10 on hold, to spend another 5 with the "supervisor" who is allowed to finally give you the proper rate.
Some MBA bean-counter types figured out there is money left on the table, and the relative hit to reputation and lost customers comes out to less than they gain by doing it.
Behaviors like this seem to mostly come out of companies with only a few competitors, such as telecom companies and airlines. They know they can push the limit of what people can or will pay due to lack of options.
This is literally why monopoly market power is bad.Even if you were not technically the only seller in the market, high transactions/switching costs can amount to more or less the same thing.
in some parts of the middle-east its expected you haggle to get a deal. if you don't , you arent showing respect and society expects you get screwed with a ridiculously high price.
This part of the culture boggles my mind from a distance, but I haven't experienced it firsthand. Wouldn't a side effect of this common practice be a negative opinion of merchants? Like, if you go into every shop with the implicit understanding that the merchant isn't charging a fair price, and you're going to have to talk him down, doesn't that make the merchants seem dishonest by default?
That seems like it'd bubble out and affect the surrounding communities, but I don't know how exactly. Do you have first-hand experience there?
I guess a traditional vendor will make their own products that they are selling. The marginal cost could be pretty low, and there is no fixed price put on the hourly rate of the vendor. In that case it makes sense for the vendor to sell at any price that isn't completely insulting if they have product available. It is not dishonest because there is no fixed price in the first place. But it would be stupid to sell yourself short, and that would devalue the product and insult the buyer.
That's funny, I regularly say please give me a discount or credit, politely, in person, emails or on phone. For the last four times I can remember, the CS rep was always nice and on top of that, does it.
For me it depends on the company. The large, "everyman" companies, the Comcasts and T-Mobiles of the world, have always had me dealing with a customer service representative on a script giving me friction about something that is completely within their reach, but they're made to be unhelpful until you cross some threshold. Start off polite, but the second they tell you something "isn't possible" you drop the polite tone, get stern, ask for supervisors, etc. That isn't to say swear and insult, and you should reset the politeness each time you get a new person.
In my experience anything even a little more "targeted" tends to have more reasonable customer service. I've had good customer service experiences from major sportswear brands, and we're not talking crazy high-end, boutique brands but major, publicly traded companies. That isn't to say they will just cater to your every whim, no questions asked, but if you have a legitimate grievance they will handle it without ruining your day.
Some companies care about reputation and customer satisfaction, and some just count every bean.
I have had the exact opposite experience - every 12 months I call Comcast when my 1-year introductory offer of internet service for $39.99/month is expiring and ask for it to be re-upped, as opposed to increasing to $64.99/month or whatever, and they do it with no hassling. Heck, this year the dude on the phone voluntarily gave me a better deal of $29.99/month for 12 months.
* not a shill for Comcast, just a happy customer. I tend to be extra-friendly over the phone, which maybe helps, but I have always received stupendous CS support from big corps like Apple, Comcast, Sprint, my CC companies, mortgage holder, and Amazon, to name a few I have dealt with regularly.
My experience with comcast has been extremely variable depending on where I live, and in particular, what other ISP options I have.
When I lived somewhere where the only alternative was terrible 5mbit (advertised, actually much less) AT&T DSL, they wouldn't extend any of my discounts and even when I canceled they didn't even try to stop me. They basically just told me "haha good luck, you'll be back".
When I've lived in other places where there are options like webpass or fiber, they behaved much more like you're describing.
Exactly. It also depends on your neighbors. Right now we have two relatively similar options, but for various reasons the neighbors are all the type to never switch. So, no one will negotiate and you just have to switch back and forth every year if you actually want the discount.
Never works for me, but maybe you navigate the structure of the organization better? For instance, when I changed cable companies last, the ‘retention’ department stooge was dopey, didn’t know anything, and couldn’t offer anything. Whereas the sales person for the company I switched to was sharp, quick, ready to discuss options, and made me an offer.
And as I recall, I had put a block on my credit report, so it took a few calls to the sales agents to close the deal. Each one was equally willing to deal, but then again, each time I called back I had to give more to get the same deal (1 year to 3 year, 100$ product gift certificate gone, and finally no free installation—uuug! They said I had the GC, but it never showed up. I called, they stalled, whatever)
> There's also the other side of the fence though: customers who are just a resource drain.
Sweet Jesus, this. At one of my older software support jobs, we had a Law of Inverse Size-to-Attention: the guys with hundreds of employees who paid us hundreds of thousands of dollars in support rarely called us (or if they did, they had actually competent IT staff we could work with), while the Mom-and-Pop shops that paid for the bare minimum licensing and support were the ones that called us every day and repeatedly refused to RTFM. Some would balk at the idea of paying anything at all, as though we should be so honored that Bob's Shack in Bumf*ck, ID decided to use our software that we should wave all associated costs.
> the guys with hundreds of employees who paid us hundreds of thousands of dollars in support rarely called us (or if they did, they had actually competent IT staff we could work with)
These are all related.
Customers who are successful businesses tend to have money, and competent employees who solve many of the problems themselves. Customers who are not successful tend not to have money and less competent employees.
This is why so many people recommend startups and contractors to raise their prices - not only do you get paid more, but also you filter out less competent customers.
Yes, when you start dealing with companies who make too much to concern themselves with quibbling over a couple of million, your $75,000 bill isn't even worth a second thought.
But then you are leaving a lot of money on the table. My work built a business by selling specifically to the bottom since the market for selling to the big players was so saturated.
As a result our sales and customer support departments are massive compared to our engineering arm but we're doing pretty well for ourselves.
> In the end, reducing support to the bare minimum possible appears a reasonable option for many companies: it is the easiest to implement, it reduces legal/PR risks, and it has a very measurable and consistent effect (how many people stop buying/using your service after failing to get support).
I agree that this is the best short interest for corporations. And that is why it is so important laws to protect consumers.
Corporations act in completely selfish economic interest. Mandatory customer support and hefty fines and regular inspections are the only protection for consumers. Also, it creates a fair environment where having good customer support is not an extra cost because of all companies having to provide it.
Corporations have a social responsibility that needs to be enforced. Corporations are going to optimize their extractive capacity until we humans are just reduced to production machines that survive another day to feed corporations profits. Our society goal should be human wellbeing, not corporate profits.
> "...it just doesn't make economical sense to try to provide good support, which is a very hard endeavor for the reasons mentioned above."
it's economically rational but it's also a classic externality. the cost of poor service is externalized onto customers not only as direct costs in time and money but also indirectly as human anger and violence, which trickles out socioeconomically as general incivility (e.g., road rage).
i'm all for strengthening the legal equality of the individual so that corporations can't shirk off such externalities as simply a cost of doing business, as you suggest.
most "bad" customers are reacting to unfairness and injustice, not trying to swindle the company. treat customers fairly, even erring on their side, rather than treating them like moneybags for the squeezing, and you'll find good customer service is fast and easy (if tricky to master).
I worked for a massively incompetent electronics conglomerate at one point. They decided to change all of our phone numbers for some reason. My number became a former support number, and if you had an old enough product and looked in the manual for our support number, I might have gotten that call.
Most of the time I just gave the callers the correct number, but if it was a product I had worked on I would try to answer their questions...
Some dumb f* called up once and claimed he had taken the batteries that came with a product of ours he bought, put them in his Apple keyboard, and they had leaked, ruining his keyboard. He was adamant he was owed a keyboard.
I tried explaining politely that batteries leak from being over-discharged... But he wasn't having any of it. I eventually handed him off to customer service, who I assume told him to pound sand.
What most likely happened wasn't that they were overcharged, but that they dried out and expanded. He probably just needed to clean his terminals and put in fresh batteries. That doesn't just happen overnight. Either that or he tried to recharge non rechargable batteries.
Back in the early 2000s, I could call up my internet provider (Bellsouth) and talk to an actual, technically trained person who could intelligently diagnose and fix problems with my service. Now, I get someone who parrots back my problem descriptions without understanding them, insists I perform useless steps that could never help, then shrugs and tells me a technician has to come to my house. That's if I can get through the phone system that forces me to use voice commands.
Never, ever sign up for residential Internet service. Always sign up for business service. You'll be amazed at how much better this type of situation plays out, for both you and the support rep.
Agree to disagree. For most people it's probably the most important criterion, a make or break. It's why so few people go for the business services. SLAs cost. And without SLAs you get to learn that "0" is also "up to xxx Mbps" for example
The problem is companies like Comcast, AT&T and the likes champion low quality services for high prices because consumers have 0 protections.
Note that "business Internet" doesn't imply an SLA. I don't pay significantly more than a typical residential customer for Comcast business service at my house.
If you're concerned with driving every last penny out of the cost of service, then you're going to have to deal with the lowest-level consumer support personnel. That's just how this works. Grandma and Grandpa are not going to get a direct line to the red phone at the NOC for $39.99/month, and neither will you.
Without an SLA it's just a different label on the same package. If it offers the same (lack of) guarantees as any residential contract, and only costs marginally more then why would it be better? Why are they giving you substantially better service for just slightly more money if there's absolutely no contractual obligation? You're probably just in an area with better service.
When the service is crap do you threaten them with the label on the plan or with the SLA in the contract?
Without an SLA it's just a different label on the same package.
Sigh
Without an SLA it's just a different label on the same package.
The whole point is that the service isn't crap. You have a separate telephone number for business support, where even the first-line support people are helpful.
And your static IP also comes from a different subnet in many/most cases, one that tends to stay off the radar of bottom-feeding copyright trolls.
And my whole point is trying to understand how a service that costs basically the same and has 0 extra contractual obligations for the provider is somehow better than the regular residential internet. I'll say coincidence and you'll say "no but I can't tell you why".
If you don't have a smoking gun for why a service is good then it's happenstance and there are no guarantees that others will have the same experience. It's a good area, the infrastructure is better there, there are very few "business but no guarantees" subscribers so your dedicated line isn't busy all the time, etc. So it may very well be good but with no SLAs you're still at their mercy and they can do to you whatever they do to the "plebes internet".
What happens if on the dedicated line (that you get without paying much) you get told "we'll look into it, kthxbye" and then nothing?
I have great residential internet and actually only had to call my provider for my connection once in my life (thought they cut me off after not paying the bill for 3 months; turned out they didn't care and I just had to reboot the router). Would you take this anecdata as proof that all internet connections are good or as mere coincidence?
Go back to the first post in the thread that I replied to. The poster says, "Back in the early 2000s, I could call up my internet provider (Bellsouth) and talk to an actual, technically trained person who could intelligently diagnose and fix problems with my service."
I pointed out that this type of support is still available if you have a business account, and that it doesn't cost much more (if at all) to sign up for a business account with major ISPs such as Comcast than it does to sign up for a residential account.
I don't need the typing practice, so I'll stand by my point and leave it at that. SLAs and contractual obligations and whatever are not the topic of the subthread. The fact is, there are good reasons for technically-literate users to sign up for business accounts instead of residential accounts. Support personnel who don't begin the conversation with, "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" or who at least listen when you tell them that in fact, you have tried turning it off and on again, are one of those reasons.
I've recently been involved in some customer support efforts, and there are customers who are just unreasonable. They'll demand to have their cake, eat it too, and even get a new one. For the nuisance that a completely made up problem caused them. A problem that wouldn't even be your fault if it had been real.
They are a vast minority, but they spoil it for everyone. They consume your time and especially your team's morale. There is only so much bullshit a support agent can take before getting fed up with it and degrading their service to subsequent customers.
Now the organization has to figure out a way to detect those customers early enough to prevent them from screwing up everything for everyone. But false positives are very expensive: get one wrong and it becomes a PR nightmare.
Furthermore, if you try to give the best possible support, you must empower your agents to act. They can now screw up and even get your company in legal trouble. Good training reduces this risk, but humans making calls means errors will be made eventually.
In the end, reducing support to the bare minimum possible appears a reasonable option for many companies: it is the easiest to implement, it reduces legal/PR risks, and it has a very measurable and consistent effect (how many people stop buying/using your service after failing to get support). If that number is low enough, it just doesn't make economical sense to try to provide good support, which is a very hard endeavor for the reasons mentioned above.