Customer service experience

[Jazzy]

Have you ever had a negative customer service experience with a company? If so, can you describe it?

 

[tango]

I suspect you'd struggle to find anyone who hasn't had a bad customer service experience at some point.

Usually it relates to a call center where you spend half an hour hearing how important your call is to them before being connected to someone who can barely speak English, doesn't understand the problem and won't do anything more than endlessly repeat your name multiple times in every sentence as if that would solve anything. Then when they offer to connect you to someone else who might be able to help you spend another 20 minutes on hold before being disconnected.

 

[Stravinsk]

My internet company. It stands out as a particularly disgusting attempt to swindle me.

For a while I had some connection issues. Normally when this happens I wait till it gets significant, then place a call. Normally they investigate, and if the problem is on their end it's fixed fairly quickly.

However, on one occasion when I called I got connected to a young male who apparently was given leave to try to scheme customers. I was told it was probably the lines in my home, but of course they could send someone out to fix it...and it would be $$ for the call out, $$ for every meter of line they inspected and so forth.

I smelled a scam, said I wanted to talk to the manager and threatened to go to another provider. That was enough to get the young man off the phone and my problem was fixed like normal.

 

[Josiah]

I suspect you'd struggle to find anyone who hasn't had a bad customer service experience at some point.

Yeah.

Usually it relates to a call center where you spend half an hour hearing how important your call is to them before being connected to someone who can barely speak English, doesn't understand the problem and won't do anything more than endlessly repeat your name multiple times in every sentence as if that would solve anything. Then when they offer to connect you to someone else who might be able to help you spend another 20 minutes on hold before being disconnected.

Often, I've found Customer Service to be quite helpful. But when not, the frustrating thing to ME is not just the lack of resolution but the representative been SO nice, so polite, so down-right sweet - and completely useless. As if super-nice is just as helpful and good as a resolution. Well, that, AND once I got this guy who obviously was in India and sincerely, I just could not understand him! I tried - I really did - but just could not. I finally asked to be switched to a different representative, and that happened, and he was WORSE! I finally just gave up.



.

 

[tango]

Often, I've found Customer Service to be quite helpful. But when not, the frustrating thing to ME is not just the lack of resolution but the representative been SO nice, so polite, so down-right sweet - and completely useless. As if super-nice is just as helpful and good as a resolution. Well, that, AND once I got this guy who obviously was in India and sincerely, I just could not understand him! I tried - I really did - but just could not. I finally asked to be switched to a different representative, and that happened, and he was WORSE! I finally just gave up.

Often it seems there's an army of lackeys in the way, whose primary goal is to be really nice but utterly ineffective at solving the problem. There's no point shouting at them because they can't do anything but a key part of their job is to deter you from pushing the matter any further. Then, when you get the inevitable "how was your support experience?" survey question you want to rate them highly because they were so nice, even though you wasted an hour on hold and half an hour going round and round in circles and still didn't get your problem resolved.

Either that or you get the kind of assistant who takes criticism of the company as being personal criticism against them.