
Why Everyone Hates Customer Service - psim1
https://www.wsj.com/articles/everyone-hates-customer-service-this-is-why-11564804882?mod=rsswn
======
kilburn
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.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
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.

~~~
doctorpangloss
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.

~~~
mieseratte
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.

~~~
Fezzik
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.

~~~
kbrackbill
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.

~~~
uberduber
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.

------
js2
Let me provide a counter-anecdote.

I purchased a utility sink/cabinet combo from Home Depot last year for $200.
The same product is sold by Lowes and all over the Internet in various styles.
The OEM is this company called Conglom, but Home Depot markets all its
plumbing products as "Glacier Bay" and has its own support system for those
products.

So anyway, I install the sink and the faucet has a small leak. So I call the
Glacier Bay number expecting terrible service. The call is answered
immediately. A lady takes my information and says she'll contact the OEM and
get a new part sent to me and puts me on hold. She picks back up a minute or
two later to say the OEM is closed for the day but she'll contact them the
next day. I think that's the end of it, but then I get a call from her the
next day to confirm she's reached the OEM and the replacement part is on the
way.

HD can't make but a few dollars if anything on this product.

Aside, Moen also provides insanely good customer service. And I've heard Delta
faucets does too. Maybe it's a plumbing thing. :-)

~~~
crankylinuxuser
I've had a similar extremely amazing experience. I do a lot with 3d printing,
and I buy Misumi extrusions.

During a large format printer I built, their website claimed that the 90deg
brackets werent guaranteed to be 90deg ?! So, I called them, and got the
secretary. I was expecting to be shoved off. She looked at the website where I
indicated, and asked me to wait a few moments.

About 45 seconds go by, and I'm talking with a Japanese engineer who's fluent
in English who _runs the line_ ! He looks at the design schematic and the
website, and says it had to do with a data import that didnt convert the
tolerance data (90deg +- .0021) correctly, and instead put a boilerplate
'NOTANUMBER' result.

He then sent me the design schematic for all incident angles.

It was absolutely amazing - that I talked with the engineer responsible for
that part in less than a minute.

So.. I keep buying from Misumi. :)

~~~
bsder
> I've had a similar extremely amazing experience. I do a lot with 3d
> printing, and I buy Misumi extrusions.

Excellent products and customer service seems to also be a very Japanese
thing.

We used to order ring clamps from a manufacturer, and they would always come
back polished absolutely perfectly. We didn't order it that way, and we told
them several times that they were wasting money doing that. It didn't matter;
there was an old Japanese engineer running that line and he was going to be
consigned to the fires of hell before a part with a substandard finish would
leave his line.

Then he passed away. And even the tolerance control (which is vitally
important) went to shit. It seems that attention to detail is all or nothing.

------
dfee
Question: the article cites a lady who was frustrated with AT&T customer
service - she’s from Illinois.

How do newspapers find anecdotal stories like this? I mean this could have
been anyone, anywhere - we all have these sorts of frustrating stories.

Is there a sort of marketplace or broker who has a list of on-demand
anecdotes?

I just can’t imagine it’s worth it for WSJ to fly a reporter halfway across
the country to get a head shot and a one paragraph statement.

~~~
EVdotIO
HARO is mostly the answer.

~~~
dredmorbius
[https://www.helpareporter.com](https://www.helpareporter.com)

"Help A Reporter Out (HARO): Your PR Agency's Worst Nightmare"
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/zalmiduchman/2015/11/27/haro/](https://www.forbes.com/sites/zalmiduchman/2015/11/27/haro/)

"Help a Reporter Out (HARO): Ultimate Guide 2019"
[https://fitsmallbusiness.com/help-a-reporter-out-
haro/](https://fitsmallbusiness.com/help-a-reporter-out-haro/)

------
aalleavitch
A lot of customers treat customer service like a psychological outlet, someone
who is paid to take their abuse. I have seen and heard some pretty horrible
situations of a customer who is clearly taking out their own emotional
problems on a poor CS rep time and time again. I don't know many CS people who
haven't ended up in tears at work at least once. It's a psychologically
hazardous job, and it gets no fanfare.

It doesn't help that the relationship between customers and businesses is so
often just directly antagonistic, customer service isn't something that
businesses want to do, it's something they have to do. CS people end up being
the meat shield between the customer who knows they are being exploited or
manipulated and the people in the company making decisions for little bits of
profit or to cut costs here and there and never directly has to face
repercussions for all the shortcuts they take just to bolster their personal
KPIs. There's a reason people hate working CS and retail; it can be
legitimately traumatic, and they often have to find themselves being the
friendly face pasted over an uncaring machine.

For all the hate that open offices get, I appreciate the fact that my desk is
within earshot of CS taking phone calls. As a developer it's a hell of a lot
easier to see what the downstream effects of the things you do and the changes
you make are when you can hear the repercussions of them directly. It also
definitely motivates me to try to find ways I can ease the burden on them.
These stresses ought to be distributed as equally among a corporation as
possible.

~~~
nitrogen
I've worked for a couple of companies where engineers shadowed the people on
the phones (both sales and support) periodically. It can definitely help build
empathy for the users of internal tools and the end customers, but it doesn't
do much if the rest of the company doesn't prioritize fixing the problems
found by those shadowing.

------
0xDEFC0DE
Lots of potential to undermine this. Start every customer service interaction
with “I’m going to cancel my service”. Make yourself sound angry but don’t
attack the representative directly of course (don’t be an asshole). Say you’re
angry, definitely. Sense of urgency, and other social engineering techniques.

Companies can’t stop this that easily. If they do, they basically have to try
to call bullshit and confront them. Any system that counters this will end up
harming normal customers who are generally angry.

~~~
orev
Which is basically what everyone has been doing with cable companies for years
to get lower bills, until recently when they started calling everyone’s bluff.
If you try to cancel now, they’ll mostly just say “fine” and send you right
through the process.

~~~
psim1
YMMV. My method has been working well with Comcast. When it's renewal time, I
call and ask for the retention department immediately (say "cancel" to the
interactive voice response system). When the agent comes on the line, I say
that my rate is going up and I just want to keep the same rate and same
service. No threatening, no anger, no actual statement that I want to cancel.
Just, "I want to keep the same service and the same rate. Can we do that?" It
has worked for about five years so far. I switched to Comcast from Verizon
DSL. With Vz, there was no negotiation, and besides, their service was
actually terrible and I did want to cancel.

------
mikeash
The technology isn’t why. Idiot businesspeople focused on the short term who
think it’s good business to piss off their customers as long as they don’t
switch to a competitor is why.

~~~
bogwog
That's not what it is either. It's just the effects of monopolies. If the
telecom giants had to worry about real competition, they'd actually need to
make customers happy to stay competitive.

The only way I was able to escape Comcast's dogshit service was by moving to a
different house.

~~~
whyenot
There is what appears to be "real competition" in the airline industry. It
doesn't seem to help.

~~~
nyolfen
you can fly southwest

~~~
chrischen
You can fly Singapore airlines, the #1 rated airline, only except you probably
can't because airline routes are highly segregated.

------
isoskeles
Instead of solving their customers' problems immediately, they have a computer
analyze the tone of your voice and decide whether or not you really need to be
helped. We're one step closer to life being a "simulation" where very little
that is real matters. Your position as a customer and customer service's
position as an agent are irrelevant, what matters is whether or not the
computer has decided you are worth helping (until then, the agent "cannot"
help you).

I think the worst part is, people will adapt and start to treat customer
service with more anger, as they'll learn it solves their problems more
frequently. Some of them will take this behavior out into meatspace instead of
just doing it over the phone. Of course, people already do this, but even more
people will do it as a result of this sort of treatment.

------
dep_b
Customer service got so much better over the years it's almost unbelievable
that we accepted where we came from. It used to be that companies needed to be
shamed on national TV before they would even consider to change their
attitudes to paying customers.

In the 21st century so many companies really rely on good ratings by consumers
they go out of their way to get a negative review, or to compensate you to
take one away if you do post one.

Maybe the companies stuck in the 20th century or the ones that think they'll
just hold on to their monopoly forever still believe they'll get away with it
but those are businesses most likely to be disrupted in the next 10-20 years.

------
barryrandall
Please consider updating the title to something less click-baity, such as
“Everyone hates customer service. AI breakpoint analysis is why.”

~~~
psim1
A moderator has updated the title. I tried to keep it as close to the original
article's title as possible.

------
Waterluvian
It's like why people hate police. When you're dealing with them, you're
already having a bad day. And we tend to hire mediocre people for the job
because all the better candidates are doing better work.

~~~
cannonedhamster
I've got a great friend who's in the police service. They aren't all mediocre,
but there's an awful lot of them and bad apples rightly get a lot of
attention. I think the problem with policing is that it's been disproven that
it's just a few bad apples, and that they forget the adage is that a single
bad apple spoils the bunch. There's also very little public accountability for
bad policing, which is the opposite of what it should be, punishments should
be public just like their promotions and commendations are. If people were
seeing actual bad policing getting punished appropriately there would be less
outcry. You also can't take back killing someone.

------
kazinator
That's really no different from a child figuring out how far it can take
various mischief before pissing off its parents. Why wouldn't corporations do
what children do?

------
thrav
The Effortless Experience says the opposite, and all kinds of industries are
working very hard to make issue resolution as effortless as possible. That
said, those are definitely not long term contract type situations, where
resolving the issue often means losing long term money.

When you look at the industries with the best and worst customer service, it’s
mostly just a difference between low and high switching costs.

------
GuB-42
Interestingly, Amazon, one of the champions in analytics and automation, is
known for its good customer service.

Personally, I called them, sent them messages, etc... And every time I had a
helpful human (or an incredibly advanced AI) within a reasonable time.

So companies less profitable than Amazon that skimp on customer service using
analytics should learn something here. Particularly ironic if they run their
system on AWS.

~~~
tzs
I recently contacted Amazon for customer service and was shocked at how fast
it was. I entered the phone number they could reach me at on their site,
submitted it, and before I could even read the thing telling me that they
would call soon my phone was ringing.

That was an automated call to tell me that a human would be with me soon and
the current wait time was one minute. As soon as the message ended, a human
picked up.

Unfortunately, they could not do anything about my issue. Briefly, I ordered
something on Prime Day that is normally available in 3 colors. My first choice
was not available, my second choice was listed as taking a week, and my third
choice could ship immediately. I went for my second choice.

A week later, they admitted that it was not actually going to be available for
something like three weeks. Meanwhile, my first choice color was now
available. I wanted to change my color choice to that.

Alas, apparently customer service does not have the ability to change the
color option on an existing order. All they could suggest was cancel the order
and re-order, but that would lose Prime Day pricing, which had been $22 on an
item whose normal price was $49.

(Yesterday, I got a notice that because of the delays they were canceling the
order, and they gave me a coupon code to get the $22 price if I wanted to re-
order, along with a $5 gift card to help make up for the inconvenience. The
color I originally ordered was listed as being back on stock on Aug 9 for Aug
12 delivery. My first choice was listed as being back in stock on Aug 9 for
Aug 9 delivery...not sure how that works. My third choice was listed as in
stock for 2 day delivery. I decided that the third color would work with my
decor after all, and ordered that just to get this whole thing over with. It's
been shipped and I'll get it tomorrow).

------
dredmorbius
The problem with pushing right up to borders of tolerance is that borders
shift. Sometimes suddenly and violently.

As I'd commented a few days ago[1], Google's then-CEO Eric Schmidt said "The
Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not
cross it".

The problem with such a policy is in thinking that cultural and legal
boundaries are fixed and inviolate. The very process of repeatedly pressing up
to a border may trigger the backlash which moves it, and can leave the fate-
tempting party in deep water -- with its own culture, processes, amd
institutions unable to adapt, or with goodwill so badly burnt it never
recovers.

In particular, the resource most being burnt is _trust_ , a commodity that's
expensive to acquire, quick to burn, and that big business in particular has
had in short supply for most of the past 50 years[3]. Trust, once earned and
deserved, _hugely_ reduces costs of business in that counterparties -- not
just customers, but vendors, employees, regulators, and even competitors --
tend to be inclined to cooperate and assist. And when squandered, makes every
interaction (including customer service) a scorched-earth battleground. The
topic is something of an evergreen in the business field, I'd posted an item
recently on it.[4]

There are numerous places where customer service gets it wrong, but breakdowns
of trust across multiple boundaries is hugely evident: the company doesn't
trust its customers, _or_ CSRs, marketing doesn't trust manufacturing, sales
doesn't trust service, engineering doesn't trust sales, and more. Combine this
with monopoly-sector practices and you've got huge problems. Add in elements
of James C. Scott's _Seeing Like a State_ and much more.

______________________________

Notes:

1\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20507894#20511372](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20507894#20511372)

2\. [https://www.businessinsider.com/eric-schmidt-googles-
policy-...](https://www.businessinsider.com/eric-schmidt-googles-policy-is-to-
get-right-up-to-the-creepy-line-and-not-cross-it-2010-10)

3\. [https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-
institutions.as...](https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-
institutions.aspx)

4\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20531236](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20531236)

------
anon4242
> “People want to deal with someone who is smarter than they are and who will
> fix their problem,”

This is exactly the worst kind IMHO. I once had a support person telling me to
listen to him telling me what my problem was as I was describing it to him.

    
    
      Me: "The device doesn't work..."
      Him: "Listen. Listen! LISTEN! Your device isn't connected."
      Me: "Uhm, no it's ..."
      Him: "Listen. Listen! LISTEN! You haven't plugged the cable in."
      Me: "If you would please LISTEN to me maybe we can get somewhere?"

~~~
a1369209993
That person in your transcript is neither smarter than you nor will they fix
your problem, so the quoted quote seems spot on in this case.

------
rapind
This just makes me want to automate the customer end. Bot wars.

------
dazc
'It was only when Ms. Robey was in the act of switching phone numbers to
Verizon from AT&T that the wireless carrier buckled, she said.'

Often the only people empowered to help are those in the customer retention
department.

The standard response of 'before I can help you I need to ask you a few
questions...' is another way of saying 'I am going to offer you no help
whatsoever but keep you on the line anyway...'

------
cannonedhamster
I run a support group and the amount of terrible it is to get people not in
support to recognize that taking care of our customers is not trivial. We ship
a lot of software releases and at one point took to QAing the software before
release as best we could become it would mean we'd get less support calls.
Then they started shipping the software regardless of bugs because shipping
bad software to meet the promised release dates was more important than
releasing good code.

~~~
lovich
I can't really think of any company I've worked at or seen that cares about
good code. They care about making money today. Good code helps in a few years
but shipping a useableish product helps make money today

------
manjana
The thing that scares me though is at what point, if not already, will they
start to use training data on individual customers.

------
malcolmwhat
Ironic that trying to scroll down immediately floods me with a ridiculous full
page message that is not the article...

------
crankylinuxuser
So as much as it angers and creates a horrible atmosphere for all involved,
screaming and cursing at a customer rep _does_ indeed work. The faster you
escalate, the quicker you will get what you want.

~~~
dazc
My niece worked for the mortgage arrears dept. of a major bank one time and,
apparently, it was common for people to make death threats and such because
she would have to ask they brought their payments up to date.

All this achieves is a high rate of staff turnover and a lot of bad feeling on
both sides of the fence.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
Oh, I completely agree. It makes me feel terrible, and I'm sure it creates an
even more terrible work environment for the CSRs. I know. I've been an IT
helpdesk employee. And we only got a sliver of nasty complaints.

The distinction from the article, is that the big companies whom can afford
this tech, are doing analytics and reporting to the CSR when to not offer
solutions, and when to offer. And unfortunately when doing voice analytics,
the louder you are and the more 'power words' you use, the better you're
treated by the company.

I in no way said this was good or ethical. It's abhorrent, and I'd rather
steer clear with companies that use this. But in the bigger scheme of things,
if I deal with a handful of mega-conglomerates that have phone lines, I must
use this tactic in order to be made whole.

And then, I help create the horrible work environment... Sigh.

------
cultus
The magic of capitalism is that the full resources of the planet's human minds
are devoted to increasing the wealth of the owners of capital.

------
droithomme
Given they are playing the game of abusing the customer until they push back
or crack, all validated by studies, it is morally right and sensible for
customers to play the game on their terms. Get angry quickly, abuse customer
service, yell, and make threats. According to this article that is how you get
taken seriously by customer service and escalated to reps who will treat you
fairly and resolve your problem.

 _> Some companies now equip call centers with software that analyzes a
caller’s tone of voice and pace of speech to determine how upset the person
is. Angrier callers get routed to agents skilled at de-escalating conflict_

------
ryanmarsh
When I started traveling more frequently for business I learned from a veteran
traveler, “always fill out the surveys they email you and nit pick anything
and everything they did wrong”. This, she said, would result in more upgrades,
shorter hold times, etc. From what I’ve been able to gather it’s true. I’m
upgraded almost every time after I complain. I do this for hotels too. I’m
regularly gifted extra points and meals.

Being a sophisticated programmer I thought complaining too much might weight
my feedback. Seems the airlines and hotels aren’t that sophisticated.

~~~
lowercased
it's also going to bring down the scores of every human employee that was part
of your experience, meaning they may not get bonuses or raises, even if they
were generally good at their job. :/

~~~
isoskeles
They get bonuses?

~~~
jaclaz
Anyway they try to avoid maluses.

~~~
clairity
"maluses" doesn't seem to be a real word (in american english, anyway), but i
like it!

~~~
jaclaz
I don't know but in Latin there is both _bonus_ and _malus_ , and if we accept
the anglophone plural (like one virus, two viruses) it seems fine to me (in
Latin it would be _mali_ but it originally is only an adjective).

Anyway:

[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/malus](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/malus)

>Noun

>malus (plural maluses)

> (business) The return of performance-related compensation originally paid by
> an employer to an employee as a result of the discovery of a defect in the
> performance.

~~~
clairity
yah, being a natural latin antonym was the appeal!

and now that you mention it, i think i might have seen that term in a legal
context, but it's not used in any other context i am acquainted with.

~~~
jaclaz
JFYI, here (Italy) bonus/malus is a common name for the formula of most car
insurance policies, where basically if you have a car accident (of course if
it is your fault) you are demoted 2 "classes" (malus) and if you pass one year
without accident you are promoted 1 "class" (bonus).

The "entrance class" is the 14th, worst is 18th and best is 1st.

