Why Everyone Hates Customer Service

I won&#x27;t deny many companies are playing this game of skimping as much as they can get away with, and I despise this practice. There&#x27;s also the other side of the fence though: customers who are just a resource drain.<p>I&#x27;ve recently been involved in some customer support efforts, and there are customers who are just unreasonable. They&#x27;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&#x27;t even be your fault if it had been real.<p>They are a vast minority, but they spoil it for everyone. They consume your time and especially your team&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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&#x2F;PR risks, and it has a very measurable and consistent effect (how many people stop buying&#x2F;using your service after failing to get support). If that number is low enough, it just doesn&#x27;t make economical sense to try to provide good support, which is a <i>very</i> hard endeavor for the reasons mentioned above.

Let me provide a counter-anecdote.<p>I purchased a utility sink&#x2F;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 &quot;Glacier Bay&quot; and has its own support system for those products.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;ll contact them the next day. I think that&#x27;s the end of it, but then I get a call from her the next day to confirm she&#x27;s reached the OEM and the replacement part is on the way.<p>HD can&#x27;t make but a few dollars if anything on this product.<p>Aside, Moen also provides insanely good customer service. And I&#x27;ve heard Delta faucets does too. Maybe it&#x27;s a plumbing thing. :-)

Question: the article cites a lady who was frustrated with AT&amp;T customer service - she’s from Illinois.<p>How do newspapers find anecdotal stories like this? I mean this could have been anyone, anywhere - we all have these sorts of frustrating stories.<p>Is there a sort of marketplace or broker who has a list of on-demand anecdotes?<p>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.

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&#x27;t know many CS people who haven&#x27;t ended up in tears at work at least once. It&#x27;s a psychologically hazardous job, and it gets no fanfare.<p>It doesn&#x27;t help that the relationship between customers and businesses is so often just directly antagonistic, customer service isn&#x27;t something that businesses want to do, it&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;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.

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.<p>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.

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.

Instead of solving their customers&#x27; problems immediately, they have a computer analyze the tone of your voice and decide whether or not you really need to be helped. We&#x27;re one step closer to life being a &quot;simulation&quot; where very little that is real matters. Your position as a customer and customer service&#x27;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 &quot;cannot&quot; help you).<p>I think the worst part is, people will adapt and start to treat customer service with more anger, as they&#x27;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.

Customer service got so much better over the years it&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>Maybe the companies stuck in the 20th century or the ones that think they&#x27;ll just hold on to their monopoly forever still believe they&#x27;ll get away with it but those are businesses most likely to be disrupted in the next 10-20 years.

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

It&#x27;s like why people hate police. When you&#x27;re dealing with them, you&#x27;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.

That&#x27;s really no different from a child figuring out how far it can take various mischief before pissing off its parents. Why wouldn&#x27;t corporations do what children do?

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.<p>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.

Interestingly, Amazon, one of the champions in analytics and automation, is known for its good customer service.<p>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.<p>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.

The problem with pushing right up to borders of tolerance is that borders shift. Sometimes suddenly and violently.<p>As I&#x27;d commented a few days ago[1], Google&#x27;s then-CEO Eric Schmidt said &quot;The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it&quot;.<p>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.<p>In particular, the resource most being burnt is <i>trust</i>, a commodity that&#x27;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, <i>hugely</i> 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&#x27;d posted an item recently on it.[4]<p>There are numerous places where customer service gets it wrong, but breakdowns of trust across multiple boundaries is hugely evident: the company doesn&#x27;t trust its customers, <i>or</i> CSRs, marketing doesn&#x27;t trust manufacturing, sales doesn&#x27;t trust service, engineering doesn&#x27;t trust sales, and more. Combine this with monopoly-sector practices and you&#x27;ve got huge problems. Add in elements of James C. Scott&#x27;s <i>Seeing Like a State</i> and much more.<p>______________________________<p>Notes:<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20507894#20511372" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20507894#20511372</a><p>2. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;eric-schmidt-googles-policy-is-to-get-right-up-to-the-creepy-line-and-not-cross-it-2010-10" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;eric-schmidt-googles-policy-...</a><p>3. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.gallup.com&#x2F;poll&#x2F;1597&#x2F;confidence-institutions.aspx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.gallup.com&#x2F;poll&#x2F;1597&#x2F;confidence-institutions.as...</a><p>4. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20531236" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20531236</a>

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

&gt; “People want to deal with someone who is smarter than they are and who will fix their problem,”<p>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.<p><pre><code> Me: &quot;The device doesn&#x27;t work...&quot; Him: &quot;Listen. Listen! LISTEN! Your device isn&#x27;t connected.&quot; Me: &quot;Uhm, no it&#x27;s ...&quot; Him: &quot;Listen. Listen! LISTEN! You haven&#x27;t plugged the cable in.&quot; Me: &quot;If you would please LISTEN to me maybe we can get somewhere?&quot;</code></pre>

&#x27;It was only when Ms. Robey was in the act of switching phone numbers to Verizon from AT&amp;T that the wireless carrier buckled, she said.&#x27;<p>Often the only people empowered to help are those in the customer retention department.<p>The standard response of &#x27;before I can help you I need to ask you a few questions...&#x27; is another way of saying &#x27;I am going to offer you no help whatsoever but keep you on the line anyway...&#x27;

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&#x27;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.

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

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

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

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.<p><i>&gt; 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</i>

The magic of capitalism is that the full resources of the planet&#x27;s human minds are devoted to increasing the wealth of the owners of capital.

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