I have never, ever dealt with any above mid-sized company that handles customer service and delivery well. There seems to be a set of standardised industry practices that are completely and utterly customer hostile.
The moment regular company employees stop dealing with customer issues, delivery, etc., and hands it over to "specialists", it's basically a crap shoot whether you can get any issue resolved at all, because the systems they put in place make it nearly impossible.
For example: A courier claims they called at your house and got no answer, even though you were in and they didn't. You call customer services, but they have no way at all to contact the courier and tell them to go back and try again. Even if they're only two minutes down the road. The system deliberately puts a firewall between the reps and the delivery infrastructure, because any kind of ad-hoc action to resolve customer issues interferes with the logistics planning for the day's deliveries.
All the rep can do is rearrange delivery for the subsequent day, whereupon the problem often repeats itself, but this time with a different courier, and a different rep. I had this process repeat several times, over a period of weeks, until simply cancelled an order completely (one worth hundreds of pounds to the vendor).
I do wonder if higher level managers realise that delivery departments are optimising purely to make things easy for themselves, and what that's potentially worth in terms of wasted effort, lost orders and customer hostility. I guess they probably don't care, because it still saves them money on aggregate.
I ordered some circuit boards from Seeedstudio (good and cheap board fab, btw). I paid extra for DHL to get them quicker.
I submitted my boards to Seeed (Shenzhen) October 10. On Oct 16, said they were shipped to DHL. Awesome. Told DHL via their webapp and text messaging that "I do not need signature. Drop at doorstep". 10 boards were a whopping $5. Guaranteed delivery by 19'th, cause thats what I paid extra for.
So what does the fucknut idiot delivery driver do? "Did not deliver because no signature". I was fucking furious. I called their support line, and "we'll try to deliver tomorrow" ~~~ for WHAT? The idiot to say AGAIN that no signature, did not deliver? Uh huh, tell them to get their ass back right now and drop it off. Their claim was "They can only ask". BTW, their systems noted both my previous "I dont need signature" authorization, along with the text message responses saying the same.
Well, it turns out that Twitter is good for other things, like complaining loudly. So I reached out to the 4 contacts linked to DHL, and included my package#. I got one of their US VP's on there. Wouldn'tya know, they had the authority to tell the idiot driver to get back and deliver.
Who knows when I would have gotten my boards. But I certainly know how to bypass 'consumer firewalls'. I brought Seeed into it as well, by mentioning them with DHL. Evidently, squeezing the B2B may have worked, I really don't know.
I have had a similar experience once with UPS. To cut a long story short they really messed up, relabelling someone else's package with my address and this package was payment on delivery, which I paid. Trying to get them to come and pick up the package they relabelled in error and refund me for the payment was an absolute nightmare.
Many calls to the call centre and 2 days later I had enough. No amount of asking to speak to a manager or anyone I spoke to managed to resolve the situation. I found the email address of the CEO of UPS on https://www.ceoemail.com/ and proceeded to write him an email explaining the issue, the effort I have made to try to resolve it as well as the incompetence and inability of the staff to resolve the problem. Note this email was very professional and stuck to the facts, the only emotional bit maybe being me highlighting that I honestly expected better from a company such as UPS.
I did not expect anything to happen honestly. However 15 minutes later I received a reply from him saying it will get taken care of. 20 minutes later the manager of the distribution centre that caused the problem gave me a phone call apologising. 2 hours later a driver came to pick up the parcel and refund me the money I paid in error. I received 2 more calls from the distribution manager and that person provided their personal contact number in case I ever have any issues again.
I personally do not like going the social media route by default. I would only consider it if I have exhausted all other options and am honestly left with no other choice which seems to be the situation you were in and that is completely understandable. Maybe give the CEO email option a try next time as I believe your success was due to someone high up being forced to recognise your issue. If that then fails I would hit the social media option for sure.
I live in France and in the working hours of the delivery guys I'm at work in a different city. I ordered a number of things to my personal address, and the story is typically like: "package delivered" with some strange message from the delivery guy where to find it, or no message at all. Out of the last 3 things I ordered, 2 didn't get to me (I made a claim on Amazon and they reimbursed me, no questions asked - at least), and 1 other was delivered to a shop three streets from my place, and after 2 weeks when no one came to get the thing, a good guy from the shop noticed my phone number on the box and called me.
I try to avoid buying physical stuff in the internet now, way too much stress.
DHL is mostly subcontracted to local companies. Yes, drivers do that when they have a residential address, because they cannot pull the same trick with companies at factory/office hours, they hope it goes unnoticed with individuals.
But I also have a DHL driver doing the opposite: you stay at home all day and nobody rings; then you notice that the parcel is marked as delivered on the website. What? You get outside and you see the parcel was thrown in your yard over the wall/fence/portal. You go back to DHL website and you download the receipt, to discover a beautiful fake signature of yours forged by the driver.
So he just didn't bother to ring the doorbell to save 20 seconds. He saves 20 seconds and you lose several hours waiting for him...
Also, in this subcontracting company, the drivers have very bad equipment, they do not have winter tyres (and we are talking about a mountain area...), they do not have enough large enough vans, so the drivers try to ditch as many parcels as possible in any 'possible' way because otherwise they have no room for pickups...
The driver even showed up one day with a regular compact car... He had to come back.
> But I also have a DHL driver doing the opposite: you stay at home all day and nobody rings; then you notice that the parcel is marked as delivered on the website. What? You get outside and you see the parcel was thrown in your yard over the wall/fence/portal. You go back to DHL website and you download the receipt, to discover a beautiful fake signature of yours forged by the driver.
IN cases like that, I would have a very hard ethical time in pushing that issue of fraud onto the driver. To be honest, I haven't done that... but the thought would definitely cross my mind.
> You go back to DHL website and you download the receipt, to discover a beautiful fake signature of yours forged by the driver.
Depending on carrier, this has hellish consequences for customers who end up having to file loss/damage claims against the carrier. Your signature attests that you received it and it's intact, so when the signature is forged attesting to such, any claims filed are summarily denied.
(Consumers usually get their money back from the shipper as a matter of customer service, but the shipper still eats the loss.)
It also happens in germany. I once talked to a deliery guy from DHL. He told me, he has 3 minutes for a delivery. That's insane. Just one red traffic light and the 3 minute windows is fucked up.
When you call dhl you only get lame exuses. "Maybe you doorbell isn't working?" Sure, DHL, sure.
In the UK we can get our money back if the goods don't make it into your hands. It's up to the seller / courier to prove otherwise although it's usually a battle arguing with them.
Royal Mail delivered a £560 multimeter to the wrong address and to a signature which wasn't mine. Never saw it again. That took a nightmare battle from hell to get sorted.
I actually found that in the UK at least, you get on twitter and call them thieving bastards repetitively until they are fed up with you and just give you the money to shut up :)
Some of the vendors allow you to select the delivery company. I like this.
It's pretty hard to get back to a seller and try to explain him the delivery company he is using is potentially scamming, especially as it only affects me (the receiver), not the shipper.
You don’t need to guess, it’s been documented. Most have impossible schedules. Ugly industry, and it would be costly to make it less ugly. So we all look away.
Amazon lockers are the best thing since sliced bread. They put the ball back in your court to pick it up, when you have time. Removes the stress completely and makes ordering pleasant again.
This kinda thing is extremely good and I'm surprised it hasn't caught on in a bigger way. Many (most?) purchases are made online these days, but when you do so you have to make one of a couple of awkward choices:
1. request a delivery at work, let the receptionists at your office sign for the package and very politely thank them each time (and don't do this too often)
2. place the order to be delivered at your home address, knowing that you won't be there and that you'll have to pick up the "you were out..." slip, and duck out of work and cross town later in the week to the post-office sometime during opening hours and suffer the queues there.
The reason I use the word "awkward" is that I feel like I'm misusing some facilities no matter what I do (expecting a receptionist to handle my packages, or making a postman bring a package all the way to my flat and then all the way back home and fill out forms etc).
> request a delivery at work, let the receptionists at your office sign for the package and very politely thank them each time (and don't do this too often)
Everyone in my office does this, although we don't have a dedicated receptionist and the job normally falls to the office manager instead. It doesn't even cross my mind as a misuse of company resources. Is this something that would be considered inappropriate in other places?
It depends, I think in a larger office it can get a bit out of hand. My previous workplace was a few hundred people and the pile of packages was a little shocking, especially around christmas time. My current workplace the downstairs reception is shared between a number of companies, so they're not even our employees which makes it a bit worse.
It could be that this is all fine and I'm overthinking it - so maybe take what I"m saying with a pinch of salt :-)
As a counter-example: we have a receptionist and a dedicated mailroom which is staffed for full business hours. I do imagine it gets nuts around christmas, but it's essentially an office perk / honestly I'd consider it something that should be expected by default - the alternative is, as mentioned, home delivery when you're not home, which is ridiculously ineffective and has problems with theft.
Fully agree. Unfortunately the lockers are not very popular yet in France. But I've seen a few added in the last months in my area, hope it catches the steam, because it's way better.
The problem though is that most of the time I can not choose the delivery company, and I've only seen La Poste having the lockers.
With the all the home deliveries that people have these days I think it should be mandatory for all new constructed condos etc to have delivery lockers. The item gets delivered to the locker the code is messaged to you retrieve when you get back home.
The current place I am living in has the security gate intercom dial my handphone. So for any package delivery I tell the guy I will open the door for him but I am not at home so to leave the item outside my apartment door.
We have a few Amazon Lockers in Paris and the suburbs. It's awesome. A lot better than the usual "Relais Colis".
Just flash the barcode from the email, and it opens the appropriate locker. It even lets you open multiple ones with a single barcode if you received multiple packages the same day.
I'm curious, is it uncommon to have packages delivered to the mailroom at your place of work? That's what I've done for the last 4 years and I've never had a problem.
It is not uncommon, but at a mid-sized company it is a bit problematic: when the receptionist has to handle private parcels for a couple of individuals, that is OK; but when there are 100-200 employees and they regularly order non-work related stuff at their company address, it becomes a burden on the receptionist, burden that is not part of what the company pays him for.
So :
* small company where everyone takes care of (his own) deliveries: OK.
* smallish company company where there is a receptionist: OK because it does not happen too often.
* middle-sized company: not OK.
* large company with a dedicated mail/parcel/delivery service: I guess it depends on formal work agreements.
-We solved this in a simple manner at a former employer - we just had everybody who wanted something sent to work have it addressed to such-and-such, room 40.
Room 40 was a bench behind the warehouse reception.
Of course, there are potential pitfalls here - say, assuming your colleagues to be honest, for instance - but to the best of my knowledge, we never lost a parcel in years. (Which is more than could be said for anything entering the murky depths of our ERP system...)
At AOL in late 2001 they insisted that employees cease receiving non-work packages at work. The legit concern was the anthrax being mailed to DC area offices. That was also just past "peak AOL" so I was soon freed from this problem, with a decent sverance to boot.
I have found ordering from B&M's via their websites and picking the thing up at the store bypasses this whole problem.
I experienced the receptionist losing track of my stuff once and it was a really uncomfortable situation because, obviously, you're still colleagues and you don't want to get too pushy, but at the same time, where the hell is the stuff I paid for? After that I stopped having stuff delivered to my office.
And anyway you may not want everyone to know what you are buying.
I've rented a mailbox at a private post office for years to do this. It's basically a subcontracted receiving department, and they can deal with parcels from any vendor or courier for me.
Maybe... I've used them three times, I think. Once everything was good, the next time I couldn't retrieve the package because the touchscreen and barcode reader were malfunctioning, and then the third time I got someone else's package and mine vanished into thin air. (I was able to dox the other person and leave their package where they could get it though.) The company where I work has essentially the same thing, and seemingly more reliable, if I'm willing to wait an extra day for it to get through their system.
I almost never have to return anything but the one time I had a defective item I decided to use a locker for the return exchange and it never worked, they were always all full (London, UK) so then I had to end up going to a post office anyway.
It has been my experience that if you order with a credit card and the item is not delivered you will not be charged. I usually let the credit card company handle it to avoid the hassle.
Also being in France, I find that the most reliable and practical way to get something shipped is to use a "point relai" (when delivery at work is out of the picture because of company policies). Delivery services generally know better how to find them and deal with them, since other people use them too.
When your package is damaged, some will even offer to add a note to your delivery, without you asking, in case there's a problem later.
I order very regularly from Amazon, and I think I have never had a single problem receiving packages this way, and it's pretty easy to find one on your way from work or somewhere that suits you.
Some of them are even open on Sunday, depending on what their main business is, very convenient ...
Yes I'm trying to use point relais right now whenever possible. However oftentimes Amazon says to me that the items I want to buy can't be delivered to point relais (probably there are restrictions on size and type of products).
It seems to me that being an expat in Japan is a win win with no downside, as one can enjoy everything that works within their society while avoiding all the social pressures the Japanese suffer.
We are planning a trip soon to investigate our insight.
Haven't been there, but anecdata from my friend who spent 2 years there says yes, but you have to probably work remotely, because Japanese companies are very rigid, hierarchical and conservative - culture clash might be hard and you might be suffocating.
Agreed. But working remotely from Japan can be a great lifestyle if you can pull it off. Almost all of Japan's downsides come from working for traditional Japanese companies.
Isn't the point of the signature to protect them? You can't just say "I don't need a signature, I promise not to sue you." and expect them to just be ok with that, or have I got the wrong end of the stick here?
Why not? You say that with some authority, as if it's well known that this option doesn't exist. Why, then, do all the delivery companies give you the mechanism to waive the signature?
Sure you can. Many offer this option officially. For example, when I've ordered iPhones from Apple, they let me "pre-sign" online before delivery, which means the delivery person will drop it off if I'm not home.
Of course, the tradeoff is that if your package gets stolen, they're no longer responsible for it, which is why I've never actually done this.
Absolutely. If I were ordering bigger ticket items, you can be sure I'd tell them "I want to pick it up at the shipping office".
But in my case/story, it was $5 set of PCBs I had fabricated. Shipping was $20 for what amounted to an ePacket. I took the chance of having someone steal them (unlikely) to tell them to just drop it off at my dorrstep (in reality, a screened in porch).
Yeah, it can be totally reasonable to waive the signature in exchange for assuming liability. Depends on where you live, what you ordered, how you feel that day....
I've done it a lot but I'd be given pause for something worth a thousand bucks. But like, I'm not taking time off of work to sign for a PlayStation game.
I live in a 130,000 person city. UPS will not drop packages off to your neighbor period, even though that is an option on the "Sorry we missed you slip." UPS will not drop package without signature. UPS took 2 weeks to deliver my replacement part for my vacuum. When I see the UPS driver I tell him UPS policy sucks and is anti-city and his response was maybe there were too many packages taken. "I've lived here for 10 years and never had a package taken and this part is $10."
United States Postal Service allows drop offs without signatures and dropping off at neighbors. I constantly request that my packages are not mailed by UPS.
Unfortunately package theft is common. Our neighborhood suffered several thefts and eventually the police put fake packages with GPS trackers into the delivery boxes then waited to see where they went. They ended up in the house of the person who delivered the newspaper..
Happens here in London, UK. Amazon like to leave packages on my doorstep. Stolen every single time. To fix this they appear to have left instructions to "sling it over the back fence" or "jam it in the letterbox and destroy it".
That seems rather risky. I see lots of people rummaging through recycling cans on the street for the recycling value of the cans and bottles. Or someone could just throw a big gross thing on top of it.
I was amazed to learn that the USPS leaves packages on the door step, always. I mean this was a surprise to me because I grew up in the UK where said package would be stolen in short order, and then for the past 20 years living in the US I was in either apartments where there is no doorstep, or out in the wilds where the postman doesn't come within a few miles of your doorstep. I'd never been in a situation where the post office were able to leave a package on my stoop. But now we have an office location in town with a bone fide door step, right on a busy street and they leave packages in plain sight. When I expressed surprise I was told this is standard procedure for the USPS everywhere. I have a security camera pointed at the door step and so far no thief has stepped forward to have their picture taken...
This reminds me of a segment on Top Gear (the BBC TV show for those unaware) in which Jeremy Clarkson is lamenting that having a pickup truck in the UK would result in your belongings in the bed being stolen when stopped.
For what it's worth, I have ordered many online items (100+) over the last several years, and every one has been left on my doorstep by USPS or UPS. The only time I have had a package stolen was during a summer I spent in a notably dangerous area. The rest of the orders were safely delivered, in my case to a college-town apartment or a suburban family home.
Fair enough, but counterpoint: I live in a vintage building on a busy street, and the USPS carriers never leave packages on our doorstep. Each apartment has put up a little sign on their front door indicating how they'd prefer packages left (on the stairs, out back, whatever), which the postal workers all adhere to.
I see them walking past my window, from the front of the building to the back, all the time.
I got dire warnings from my neighbor when I bought my house that package thieves were on the loose (along with warnings about coyotes and heroin addicts). So far the packages have been fine and I haven't seen any coyotes or heroin addicts either, so hopefully my run of good luck continues.
I mean I'm sure all that stuff is going on somewhere, but, irrational as it may be, as long as I personally haven't encountered it I don't feel compelled to take any particular countermeasures.
I would never allow them to leave my package at neighbors house and if they do I would write a note to the support. This is my package and I want it delivered to me. I can't understand what is the problem of rescheduling the delivery for the time that suits me the best. Or scheduling the best time in the first place. Why Japan can do this? Even Japanese Post (not only a courier) allows you to define when you'd like to get your delivery and they deliver even at 21:00. Why other countries can't follow is beyond me.
For most people, it's more convenient to go to their neighbour and collect the package right away than it is to try and reschedule a delivery for some other time.
The bigger and more dense the city, the more hostile and private the neighbors.
I take packages for all my 10 neighbors, they are happy with it, but we live in a civilised city and all our delivery drivers are extremely competent and nice
I have never noticed this in my life. Center City is where neighbors know each other and actually help each other out. The suburbs have always been hostile and anonymous.
I went to college in Minneapolis and I knew all my neighbors and most of the homeless people. When I visit my friends in the suburbs they have no idea who their neighbors are unless there is open hostility. Look at Senator Paul.
I just notice that their is a HUGE bias to bash cities all the time. When you live in a city you actually get to know and live with a wide diversity of people, hence the normal more liberal bias. My father inlaw almost dies inside anytime he visits us and can't ever say anything positive about the city (They live in the country in West Virginia and he is a successful contractor). He thinks everyone is on drugs and lives off of $45,000 for the Government. No one knows how much the working poor works these days and West Virginia's drug problem is 10x that of my city. It's just a anti-city bias.
Wow, yea, some of these responses are crazy! If I had those neighbors I'd GTFO and move to a sane neighborhood. Next time someone accuses me of being a NIMBY because I don't want low cost crack housing built next door to me I'm going to remember this thread.
You ever hear Merle Haggard's "Big City"? It's a classic and the story behind its composition is almost too good to be true. The story goes, he was on tour and his bus driver just lost it at some point and said "I'm tired of this dirty old city! As far as I'm concerned, I'd rather be somewhere in the middle of Montana!" and Merle Haggard was struck with inspiration and wrote the whole song (of which the thing about the dirty old city and Montana is a motif) almost on the spot. Then he supposedly shared the songwriting royalties with the bus driver.
"The song was inspired by a remark by Dean Holloway, Haggard's lifelong friend and tour bus driver. At the end of a packed two-day recording session at Britannia Studios in Los Angeles, Haggard went to the bus to check on Holloway, who had been minding the bus, and asked him how he was doing. Holloway responded, "I hate this place. I'm tired of this dirty old city." Haggard immediately saw inspiration, and began writing the song, based on Holloway's remark, on a nearby pad of paper. "I'm tired of this dirty old city" became the song's first line. Haggard decided that the chorus should include the narrator talking about moving elsewhere, and asked Holloway where he would rather be, to which Holloway responded, "If it were up to me, it'd be somewhere in the middle of damn Montana." "Somewhere in the middle of Montana" became part of the chorus. Haggard rushed back into the studio, where the band was packing up, and told them to unpack their instruments in order to record one last song; the band recorded the song in one take, with no rehearsal.
Haggard credited Holloway as a co-writer, entitling him to half the royalties for the song, which amounted to around half a million dollars for Holloway."
When I was a student I lived in a large student apartment building. Packages were regularly delivered to whoever was walking into the door at that moment or the first doorbell to answer, if the intended recipient was not home.
Then the person who got the package posted on an internal facebook page: "I've got a package for 304 in 605" and they would be collected.
The system worked perfectly and there were a lot of packages, I guess many potentially worth a lot.
Most neighbours round me are also out during the day.
The only 24/7 occupied house is across the road, and it's the local drug-dealing hangout, so that's a nope as they'll either fence the package or try to snort or inject it.
Most of the transient 'residents' wouldn't remember the day of the week, let alone whether they had been gifted a package.
No you have to Opt In. You write a note to leave the package at my neighbor. That is the best option for people living in cities without an Amazon Locker. My grocery store has a UPS locker system for pickup but they don't allow you to send your Amazon packages there.
I suspect this is a combination of delivery services being simultaneously an oligopoly and heavily unionized. The combination of little competition and high wages makes it difficult to justify going the extra mile.
For what it's worth I know at least UPS has a premium service where you can schedule your delivery to a specific time during the day.
The thing is, in Japan it's nothing special. Even post office would do it. More, if you wish they would lleave the package in nearest combini so you can collect on the way back from work. Combini is a convenient store available almost on every corner. It's just their customer service is on a different level. Keeping good reputation is important for them, event if sometimes cost a little bit more.
My biggest beef is that I can't seem to get UPS/Fedex/USPS to just open my front porch door and leave my packages inside anymore. My philosophy is to generally never lock anything if I can help it; if somebody wants to get in and steal my (largely worthless) stuff, all a lock is going to do is mean they kick down my door and then I have to replace the stuff AND the door.
So instead I end up with packages left out in the rain, or slung in the snowbank during a blizzard that I don't find until spring comes...
I can’t remember the last time I’ve signed for a UPS package. When we had a regular driver, back when I was racing bikes, he once said “you’re supposed to sign for this ($10 package), but I’ve dropped thousands of dollars worth of bike parts on your doorstep and you haven’t complained yet.” True, in seventeen years we’ve never had a package stolen from our doorstep here in Redmond, WA.
That said, I work from home on iPhone delivery day. Were I a thief, that would be just way too easy, knowing the day of delivery and an approximation of what the package looks like.
Does no one sign up for UPS My Choice? Very handy. I have them leave packages at the UPS store down the street from me pretty frequently, pre-sign, etc. They do all of the things they don't for you.
I think home package drop off vaults are going to grow in popularity. Getting one at my office to handle late package deliveries was really useful.
Does this usually work with any Twitter account? Even a new one with no followers? Or do you need to have followers or fame or something for the tweet to carry any weight in practice?
There should be a service where you can rent the use of a Russian troll twitter account to make customer service request tweets, taking advantage of its millions of crazy alt-right wing nut job follower parrots who will mindlessly retweet your message and threaten to boycott the company and make death threats and show up with automatic weapons at the offices of the company that didn't give you good customer service. Just mention the customer service rep's name was "Hillary".
I’ve only got a couple hundred followers and rarely tweet and it’s been massively effective a couple of times for me. It helps to work in a popular or trending hashtag for good measure.
Any account. I’ve had good experiences reaching out on Twitter to Comcast, TMO, and airlines. I complained about having a problem, but also was not rude.
I've found that the inverse is true. If you are polite, Royal Mail will ignore you. If you call them thieving bastards, you'll have your refund sorted by the end of the day.
Hard disagree on the 2nd point. It seems that needing to reach out to social media to get normal business processes to work has become the default.
Now I need to actively be registered on N social media sites and harass the company in question until such time as they bother to respond, instead of having just had to connect with the company and directly resolve the issue.
I’ve had similar experiences with delivery companies (UPS seems to be the worst for me) over the years, and sort of just accept now that this happens from time to time. After all, the “fucknut idiot” delivery driver is just a person who can makes mistakes like the rest of us. If they don’t deliver on time, I reach out to customer service and ask for a refund (works well, if you can put up with the hassle of calling)
Making a mistake is getting the house next to yours. You know, making good-faith attempts that are a mistake. This wasn't a mistake. At all.
"Making mistakes" and malicious compliance of literally driving by and not stopping are 2 very different things. Shows up on their GPS they were "there".
I was at the house, sitting on my screened-in porch when DHL 'updated' to "Sorry you didnt sign". First, I said no sig needed. Then they didn't even bother to stop. I WATCHED THEM DRIVE BY. They didn't do their fucking job.
My mom ordered something for me off Amazon, but typed in the wrong address. I walked to that address and they denied receiving any packages. From their support page, they'll call you and you'll be speaking to someone within 20seconds. They sent a replacement without question and without charging (the item was less than $50). Other times, with other issues, they'll ship you a replacement and ask you to keep the original.
I bought an Apple laptop recently. It shipped with Sierra, but I wanted to start with a clean install of High Sierra. After installing stuff I had a suspicion something wasn't compatible with High Sierra and wanted to downgrade. Frustratingly, they removed the download in the App Store. The first person I talked to on the phone walked me through an Internet Recovery--and knew the difference between installing from the Recovery Partition (which is the OS installed, High Sierra) and Internet Recovery (which installs the OS the hardware shipped with, Sierra). That, and the ability to talk me through a series of screens (including partitioning) over the phone is no easy task. The same person called me back 2 hours later to confirm everything finished installing.
I think for most other larger companies, support is a huge expense with little upside. It's cheaper to waste your time then their's. The most cost effective thing to do is hire a small number of very polite people and give them the power to do nothing.
I tried to sell a modem which I had previously purchased through Amazon. The modem came both as a bundle and by itself. I listed it correctly as purchasing the modem only, listed it "like new" (when really it was basically new, not removed from the box). It was actually the lowest price you could get it used.
Someone bought it, shipped it to them faster than necessary. About a week later I got a notice from him saying that he wanted a refund because he had thought that he was getting the bundle (not just the modem as it was listed). Why they thought they were getting the bundle like new for that price is beyond me, but whatever. I rejected the refund because it was their mistake and it would have been too much work to be worth it. Sensible, yeah?
They initiated a claim against my account and Amazon withdrew the money (it was actually great timing - overdraft). The claim said the the item condition was wrong (it was not). You are able to contest any claim like that so I took the time to explain what had happened and why the issue wasn't even about the item's condition. I don't know if they just didn't bother reading it or if all responses are handled with robots because I get a very superficial answer that didn't even acknowledge what had happened. I repeated the process in order to try to talk to another person, wrote up another account of what happened (including the new non response), and got the same kind of non-response (you must list items under the correct condition, blah, blah, blah) from a different rep. Basically, they just didn't bother answering me. I'd already wasted way more time than necessary on what I thought was gonna be a little extra cash, so now some dude in Minnesota got my modem for free, and I got an overdraft for my trouble. That's a cool trick.
Got no clue what's going on over there but I'll never sell anything there again if I can avoid it. Worst customer experience ever.
The day that I became a lifelong Amazon customer was when I mistakenly ordered a mattress to the wrong address via Prime. I noticed the mistake some 28 hours after placing the order. I nearly said that I called them to tell them about my mistake, but that isn't true. I typed in my number online AND THEY CALLED ME when an operator was available. The operator quickly calmed me down and told it was "nothing to worry about". She cancelled the shipment of the mattress going to the wrong side of the US and placed an order for a replacement within 2 minutes of learning about the problem. On top of that, without being asked, she upgraded my replacement to 1 day shipping FOR FREE so that my order would still arrive by the original delivery date.
Since I screwed up in such a ridiculous way, that I would have fully expected to have gotten slammed with a return shipping fee, a shipping fee for the replacement, and even some kind of BS replacement fee. But Amazon took the bullet and provided me the the best customer service I ever could have hoped for, which prevented me from having to sleep on the ground for even one extra night.
> Sellers just have to assume a 10% loss of gross margin due to issues like this. It's not the end of the world, but that's where the cost is.
This explains why individuals selling individual items, or a small number of items, can get so burned too. You need sufficient volume to cover all the inevitable bullets you have to swallow.
>Sellers just have to assume a 10% loss of gross margin due to issues like this. It's not the end of the world, but that's where the cost is.
Cost of doing business. Reminds me of the book "What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars" where Jim Paul describes how someone trading in lumber doesn't cry about 20% of the wood being useless, he knows 20% will be useless and he writes that up under cost of doing business. Just like refunds and customer support are a cost of doing business.
Amazon support is absolutely terrible. Amazon seller support is even worse.
I mean, the worst. Only matched by health insurance companies.
The huge problem with Amazon support is everyone I've ever interacted with (besides that one time I got forwarded to a supervisor) either have a fundamental lack an understanding of the English language or lack reading comprehension (or listening if phone support). They also won't or can't spend any significant time on any one customer inquiry, they need to move onto the next.
On the buyers side they understand how to refund an order which they do readily, ship items, say you can keep items that are errors, maybe some account stuff, and that's basically it. If you need them to do anything else that requires them to understand your inquiry it's an uphill battle.
Basically, you get terrible support if your inquiry can't be solved by quickly pressing the "refund" button or the "ship item" button. I guess most buyers usually only need those two buttons though.
I actually think that's part of why they have such a big problem with counterfeits (and other issues). If someone complains about a counterfeit some low paid employee who doesn't really understand the problem just presses "refund order," the customer stops complaining, and the systemic issues remain.
I have a nightmare Amazon seller support story, but I won't go into it for fear of spiking my blood pressure to dangerous levels. It was only resolved by me finally getting forwarded to a supervisor, who, finally, understood English.
Yeah, that's absolutely the problem they have. One time I ordered some road bike tires. Amazon sent mountain bike tires by the same manufacturer. I told Amazon. They sent me two more of the wrong tires. I told Amazon. They sent me two more of the wrong tires. I gave up. They don't read anything you write to them, they just either send you something or give you your money back.
I guess most people value money over anything else, but if I take the time to help them correct their inventory problem, it would at least be nice if they fixed it.
Very similar thing happened to me about 12 years ago.
I ordered some glassware, very fragile. It was packaged incorrectly, basically shoved in too big of a box with no padding or anything. Or if there was padding it was very, very minimal. It arrived broken, of course. It would have been nothing short of a miracle if glassware survived that packaging.
Told Amazon the item broken due to poor/incorrect packaging. They sent another packaged identically, broken.
Told Amazon, same thing, they sent another packaged identically, broken.
I tried one more time begging them to package it correctly and got another packaged identically, broken.
I just gave up and decided I didn't really need it, got a refund, and continued to drink out of dollar store plastic cups. There was absolutely no getting through to them what they problem was. I ended up feeling defeated with 4 sets of broken glasses.
Another "they don't read anything you write to them" story... Several years ago I sold a memory card via FBA. The buyer returned the card, they said they were returning it because of a defect, they said "card slows down significantly after it gets half full." Amazon's wearhouse receives the return, they mark it as sellable, and then sell it (as new) again!! Clearly its not new, the problem was evident only from using it! The new buyer didn't complain or ask for a refund, thankfully for me, but the card might have been commingled (I don't recall) so another seller might have been dinged if Amazon shipped out the used card to their buyer.
If the return reason is "defective," why would mark as sellable ever be possible?
>If the return reason is "defective," why would mark as sellable ever be possible?
Because customers don't always tell the truth, as in your perception of truth might be different from my perception of truth, meaning what's considered defective to you might be perfectly acceptable to me and to other customers.
That's my experience as well. As long as all you want is return faulty/not-needed-after-all articles then Amazon is great. Never ever had a hiccup in 10 years and I order a lot of stuff.
However if your request is a little more specific and doesn't fit neatly in whatever scripts they're using then it's a bit of a mess. I mainly use amazon.fr so I've interacted with the french support but like you they had a rather thick accent and seemed to have trouble understanding me at times even though I did my best to speak slowly and clearly. In the end I could see that they kept reverting to the script and where a bit lost when I tried to steer things away from it.
I just wanted to complain about a transporter who kept failing to deliver my parcels so it wasn't a big deal but I think it would've been pretty difficult to interact with this (nonetheless very kind) person if I had something a little trickier and more important to figure out with them.
> I've interacted with the french support but like you they had a rather thick accent and seemed to have trouble understanding me at times even though I did my best to speak slowly and clearly.
That's the one advantage of living in a tiny country (the Netherlands) that speaks a language hardly anyone else does. It's impossible to outsource customer support to low-wages countries because you simply can't find anyone there who speaks Dutch.
There are lots of low-wage Afrikaans speakers, and Wikipedia says there "is a large degree of mutual intelligibility between" Dutch and Afrikaans. So there must be some other explanation for why you get native Dutch speakers for customer support?
Afrikaans is not similar enough for customer support roles. If you hear Afrikaans as a Dutch person you can sort of get the meaning of what they are saying if they speak slow enough, but it's not like it's just a dialect.
It's a bit like the difference between English and Jamaican Creole.
Actually there are companies doing that type of outsourcing in Serbia. Wages there are still low and they have enough employees who can speak even the smaller European languages.
I think the main industry there is tourism. If there are any Dutch speaking callcenters there they aren't very common, I've never encountered it in real life (you'd instantly notice by the accent).
I don't doubt you're right about the "anything but basic refund/reship is a nightmare", but I think the reason people are praising Amazon (and I would too) is that most other companies (big OR small) don't even do that, even though it resolves like 90+% of the customer support issues and leaves happy customers behind.
As for sellers, yes, it's obvious they're getting screwed.
>I actually think that's part of why they have such a big problem with counterfeits. If someone complains about a counterfeit some low paid employee who doesn't really understand the problem just presses "refund order," the customer stops complaining, and the systemic issues remain.
I really don't understand why individual people try to sell small items through Amazon or eBay anymore. The chance of getting cheated is just so high that unless you're a high-volume seller making a business out of it the risk/reward ratio just doesn't make sense. Better to sell for cash on Craigslist or Nextdoor (with the transaction done in the police station parking lot for safety).
Probably my worst experience was with Amazon. Ordered a big sofa sized furniture. Got wrong color which was cheaper. Asked them to adjust the price since I didnt want to go through the hassle of shipping it back. No. The guy just said "we dont price match, you can sent it back and order again". Not even a sorry. I got so frustrated at his response, it ruined my day. Tried twice more with similar response. I sent it back, ordered again (at a lower price than my original order).
In Amazon's defence, this items price was dropping heavily during that period. But I wasnt asking them to give me new price.
Because of this incident plus Amazon taking 4-5 days to just start shipping and the news about fake goods, Amazon is no longer my first preference.
I ordered a small item 5 dollars item came was different tried to refund but wanted me to pay to ship back the product which costs more than the product. I gave up.
For me, Amazon by far has been the worst. Closing my account for buying too many things (and inevitably returning a tiny fraction of them because they were fake/shitty quality as most Amazon products) is the most insane thing I've ever experienced. This while I was paying for Prime. The only thing they didn't do is threaten to sue me, but stealing my membership fee is pretty on par with that.
Only if everything goes into the two categories: 1.) send again 2.) reimburse/take back
Everything else doesn't work at all.
I had a phone from Amazon, empty box delivered, they had no way to stop the contract, weeks of pain, my threat getting the police involved solved the problem.
Amazon Logistics didn't deliver important stuff with evening express several times, Amazon did nothing.
One time they tried to deliver an order at 10pm (!). And I had a 10-minute discussion with support who told me it was deliver 10am until they reread the entry and agreed it was 10:07pm - at an office address.
Support stuff lied to me and put lies in their support system.
I recently received an empty box from Amazon. No more than 5 minutes with their online support and they had created a new order to re-send the item with their fastest shipping option. Easiest customer support experience I've ever had honestly.
>I have. Amazon. Over 15 years now and flawless every time.
Wow, I have a completely different experience. I had been a Prime member up until about 2 years ago when my last 10 out of 10 deliveries arrived late. Since I noticed Amazon wasn't really competitive with other sellers on E-Bay, etc, I only used them when I actually needed something fast. So, moral of the story is I paid more for something to get it sooner, and it still didn't help.
Amazon is generally only competitive on big ticket items that you'd get free shipping on anyway. So I found Prime to be worthless.
I cancelled my prime account after a string of issues, the worst of which I’ll summarize.
I bought a $1300 camera, received a $500 camera. Easy error, easy fix. I wish.
I had to call twice to initiate the return, call twice more to find out why a moth later I had neither a camera nor my money. Turns out the return was silently rejected. Why? “Wrong item returned.” No kidding! Had to call a fifth time to finally get this resolved, but at the end of that call I realized I was paying amazing $100 annually to fix issues that they caused.
I’ve mostly had good experiences, but once I had a battery charger fail and destroy some batteries. I spent over an hour on the phone while the CSR tried (and failed) to look up how voltage worked so they could blame the failure on me instead of just sending me the $60 order again. Just gave up after ~90 minutes.
Amazon contract deliveries to organisations like Yodel, who you can't contact directly and have exactly the same problems with failing to deliver or chucking parcels over the fence etc.
Everytime I see my package is being delivered by Yodel I just sighs, they always find a way to fuck up an order.
But to be fair, it seems like Amazon, are no longer working with Yodel, I have not seen any item I have from bought from Amazon.co.uk to be delivered by Yodel for at least two years.
Yep. Other replies about bad selling experiences notwithstanding, as a buyer, Amazon's experiences are mechanically great. They might sacrifice a seller on an altar every week, and that would be sad, but it makes your statement no less true.
I have years of free Prime because my 2 day orders never come in 2 days. At least they give you something when they mess up, but they do mess up a lot.
customer service, sure. but delivery.... eh. A few weeks ago my brother ordered a tripod and got a toilet instead. Someone I follow on Twitter ordered an Xbox and got.... Capri Suns[1].
Waiting at home specifically for stuff to be delivered or picked up is insane. Let me pick it up and send it at the post office. Or at some other convenient nearby location (supermarkets are getting popular for this, although I recently had to pick something up at a paint store(?)).
Standard Dutch mail often leaves undeliverable packages with neighbours, which is great when you live in a good neighbourhood with good neighbours who are home a lot, and perhaps not so great when you don't.
But skipping work for this is stupid and unreasonable.
This is how it works in Sweden, where all post offices are now integrated with grocery stores. I’m not even sure the typical package above a certain size has the possibility to go to your doorstep, it basically just goes to the nearest supermarket.
The best seems to be to hand off the hard parts to smaller organisations and allow you to talk to those organisations (technically, the local delivery driver likely is a contractor, but you don't have a direct line or relationship with them).
E.g. when getting warranty repairs for my Thinkpad, dealing with the central Lenovo organisation wasn't great, but once they accepted "customer device has an issue" they pass it off to local service partner, and those (in my experience) deal with issues quite well. And if you don't have on-site support, some repair places take your device and handle the warranty communication for you (and have an established relationship with Lenovo making that easier). Probably not the cheapest possible setup for them though.
Much as I like Apple I'm not sure they handle the situation described better than any competitor:
> "A courier claims they called at your house and got no answer, even though you were in and they didn't. You call customer services, but they have no way at all to contact the courier and tell them to go back and try again. Even if they're only two minutes down the road. The system deliberately puts a firewall between the reps and the delivery infrastructure, because any kind of ad-hoc action to resolve customer issues interferes with the logistics planning for the day's deliveries."
If UPS claims they knocked and you didn't answer there's nothing more Apple can do than to tell you to wait for tomorrow.
Their customer service is genuinely great - but the firewall definitely exists between the shipper and the deliverer.
I think any large company works and coordinates with another large company if it's advantageous to them. Amazon works closely with USPS to drop items as close and convenient for USPS. Netflix famously worked with USPS on their DVD envelope design and I believe they even upgraded many USPS sorting machines because it was in their business interest.
I would believe Apple does the same (there's a sibling thread where UPS said they'd swing back by their house in 15m after missing a delivery of an Apple product--may be a coincidence, though).
It's funny, because I actually had this happen exactly once. I had ordered an iPhone 3G for delivery on the first day of its availiability. I was out of the house and rushing back to meet the UPS guy, but missed him. Very disappointed, I called UPS and they said "ok, he will swing back around in 15 minutes, does that work?" I remember being astonished, because as you point out, this never happens. I chalked it up to Apple putting pressure on UPS to deliver all the phones that day. Maybe even providing monetary rewards if over x% of the phones were delivered that day?
UPS has been good to me in that regard. I once had a package that needed signature that I wasn't home for. He left the slip on my door. About six hour or so later, towards the end of the driver's shift, he was driving by my house again while I was getting home. He saw a car pull into my driveway so he stopped and brought out the package and gave it to me while I was getting out of the car. Said "I tried to deliver this earlier and nobody was home." Very nice of him to 1) remember and 2) actually care.
I have an aquatintance who works at UPS and loves it. YMMV though.
This is not fully true. Amazon used DHL with me once - they didn't deliver because of a code/gate thing I used to live at. I called Amazon and they got the DHL DRIVER on the phone - me, Amazon customer support, DHL Driver on a single phone call. Amazon CS fucking rocks sometimes. So yes, there are companies that can go the extra mile and seriously dial up the heat on the delivery company.
I think the best CS will call and deal with shipping issues. Crappy companies will have none of that.
Amazon and Apple are the two biggest companies I can think of that does awesome CS, and that's because they do it in-house and they rely on consumer lock-in. If an Apple fanboy or an Amazon Prime member have a super-bad experience, they will leave and get locked in somewhere else.
Weirdly I have found Amazons support good right up until I tried to exchange a Kindle Paperwhite.
I’ve returned a fair amount of things to amazon. I had previously even received actual incorrect products in the packaging of the product I ordered (someone probably returned them to amazon as a scam) and I was able to return them without question. Easy peasy.
When I tried to return a Kindle Paperwhite that froze up every couple hours however that was a different story. I wasn’t allowed to just return it, I had to talk to support.
First call they had me powercycle it and told me to call back if it froze again. It did. I had done this myself to get it unfrozen many times.
Second call they had me factory reset it and call back if it froze again. It did. I had already done this myself.
Third call they ask “is it frozen right now?” It wasn’t. They tell me to call back when it is frozen.
Fourth call, I have it frozen, they ask me what I see and tell me to tap things to which I explain I cannot, it’s frozen! They then have me power cycle it and try to insist that that fixed the issue. I explain no, I have had this happen like 40 times now. I explain the process I’ve been through with support.
Finally they agree to give me a return authorization!
What is happening is that they are telling you to restart it and to call back later because that's there main goal, to get you off the phone asap in any way possible. Most of the time you get the "authorization" when the call center is not as busy and the rep is allowed to take time (with you on hold) to fill out the return info and follow through with what they should have done during the first call.
I wouldn't get angry at the rep, it's the managers that pressure this kind of behavior in full force, if it's busy and you are on the phone for more then 4 mins, a manger comes over and stands behind you and tells you what to say to end the call even if it doesn't make sense and guaranties the customer has to call back...
To get the best level of service you have to call when it's not so busy. Never call on a Monday or early in the morning, that's when it's the most busy. Slow times are Wed-Fri 1:30pm to about 6pm then anytime after 10pm. Sundays are a good bet if the place is open, although usually most of the reps that work on the weekend are new/less skilled hence prone to make more mistakes.
I've addressed nearly every gripe in this thread by getting a mailbox at a local UPS store. Sure, it's inconvenient and some extra money each month, but I never have packages stolen and there's always a signature available.
The most annoying part is when I deal with someone who makes it hard to deliver to a different address than my home (looking at you, Verizon) but it's always achievable.
Apple does it great. You get accurate (usually with any errors in favour of pessimism) estimates of lead times and delivery dates, and with AppleCare servicing or replacement of items has always gone super-smooth for me.
Mostly I'd agree with you, but milage varies. I for one have never had anything but stellar support from Apple, but I know people who've had nothing but struggles. GitHub has the best support I've ever encountered, both as a typical customer and as an enterprise customer – they put everyone else to shame in my book. But again, I hear stories from others who've experienced otherwise.
Courier services as you mention though seem to have terrible service across the board. It doesn't matter if they are big or small, this seems to be some sort of hard rule almost.
Honestly, a lot of the CS/delivery issues are somewhat dependent upon the consumer market that the company targets. Some communities are very word-of-mouth and reputation based. One of the ones I'm involved in is the firearm community, which is very much that way. Places that have bad CS or delivery issues get lambasted and are very affected by said issues, and those that go out of their way to help and assist their customers are hoisted far above.
I've been trying to buy a Herman Miller desk for the past few months. It's a quagmire and I'm still table-less. You'd think a two thousand dollar table would come with some customer service.
Overstock.com has excellent customer service. We order a lot from them and when something arrives damaged or with missing parts, they always have handled it quickly.
The thing is most couriers have orders to do it like this to go faster, even though it is not assumed publicly.
So if it happened one time with a company, it will probably go on.
After a lengthy lengthy process, I recently only got things moving forward with UPS, after emailing the CEO directly (found the email online, and briefly listed the situation). Soon after I got two calls, and it was fixed relatively fast (still had to follow up twice...).
> what that's potentially worth in terms of wasted effort, lost orders and customer hostility.
I agree with all of the above but wanted to underline this. Because it snowballs so much. First call they explain the problem. Second call they explain how they explained the problem to someone before, how instead they understood X and did Y. Third call... and so on. Add to that long waiting times and it compounds even more.
I did work in customer service and while I loved the people I talked to for the most part, it was really obvious that they were so nice to me because I was simply 100% frank, which was unexpected for them. And it was kinda heartbreaking how many thanked me just for listening, and not deflecting any blame, or just pointing to the EULA or whatever, but treating them like a normal person -- even though I really couldn't fix their problem, just agree that it sucks and wish them a nice day and mean it. I always tried but in many cases there was just nothing I could do except tell them all I know, and how sure I am about it. The bar was so incredibly low. When I offered people to call them back to follow up on a problem, they always were surprised when I actually did. Officially, I would have to ask permission for every outbound call, but I simply decided that that would just make it take even longer in total, so I did that once. I just made sure I was there to solve problems not chit chat, and then did what I considered necessary, not what people who didn't even talk with customers thought might be good. And when calling other departments, I also encountered people who said "you know, officially it would be X, but I think I can fix this", and they did. But it was a total crap shoot, sometimes they just made it worse or said they'd do something end then not do anything.
Once I told a coach that if the bread he eats were made as sloppily as he had suggested to me I should handle a specific problem (that is, hand it off in exactly the same way that happened 3 times before, knowing it would resolve nothing but make it someone else's problem), he would be dead in 3 months. He threw a fit and dragged me to my team leader, who had my back - a month later I hear I have a "solution rate" (some customers were asked after the call to rate friendliness etc. and if their problem was solved) of 66%, twice above the average. You might say I had ignored "orders" because I considered them bad, and my results had proven me correct. It didn't change anything about the process, but it did give me leg room if you will. At the end of the day I did the job the way I did it because I thought, if I'm going to be a drone for shitty pay, at least I want to be able to sleep at night, right? The job simply wasn't worth squirming and lying all day when I could try to make a little difference at least to that one person who had to ask me for assistance after some awfully long waiting period. But it ended up being fun and meaningful I wouldn't have imagined beforehand, and if I had just followed official suggestions and marketing materials, it would have turned out so differently, I would have learned nothing and it would have just been this shitty job I once had.
I don't believe it saves money. Maybe in the short term for the one company or a few execs in it or their shareholders, but in aggregate, it's just a waste. Call centers should simply fulfill some standards for the work and then get paid by the hour, not by call. That's all it would take, people who are in this job would mostly prefer being able to make a good job. During breaks we always used to share stories about customers on some freakish odyssey because of fucking $company. I'm sure there's also people who enjoy what little power they have over helpless callers, but if the incentives were aligned properly, they'd be gone before you can say "welcome to X, my name is Y, how can I help you?" :P
Most complaints I heard from customers, aside long waiting times, unfriendly treatment or outright incompetence, were that they didn't get feedback and had no single point of contact. Like, one person at the company who is assigned with following up on that problem until it's fixed. How would that not be flat out better? It takes 30 seconds to try to reach a customer. Just do that until you reach them, or you see something in their file indicating they called on their own and the issue is solved. Have a mechanism in place for sickness, quitting the job etc, done? Why is that hard? How is the current way better in any shape or form? If I've ever seen anything ripe for disruption, it's call centers. Talk about pain.
Yeah, call centres are especially disastrous. The whole thing is just set up to be bad because the employees are deskilled and disempowered but trying to fix cases where the automation has failed.
> some sites experience levels of failure demand, that is to say calls generated due to a prior failure to serve, over 50% of the total inbound calls.
Yeah, that sounds familiar. And the worst part is, as call centers get paid for call volume (and quality, but measuring quality except by the most shallow and misguided metrics would cost money to employ additional real people so it's avoided), it's kind of in their best interest to just have customers call over and over again. I always wondered about the kind of mutually parasitic relationship between call centers and companies that outsource to them, maybe that's really the whole problem, maybe it should be done in-house, period. If you have a big house and that makes it hard, boo-hoo. Make a smaller house, or learn to hack hard things.
> Our first anti-pattern is queueing. Call centres essentially all work on the basis of oversubscription and queueing. On the assumption that some percentage of calls will go away, they save on staff by queueing calls. This is not the only way to deal with peaks in demand, though – for example, rather than holding calls, there is no good technical reason why you couldn’t instead have a call-back architecture, scheduling a call back sometime in the future.
I used to fantasize about this. First off, you can't turn off caller ID for this, but that's fair I think. So you call the hotline, it tells you in what place in the queue you are, and that you can either hold the line or get called back when you are very close to being the next in line. You can call anytime to have an update on your queue position and wait, and if you miss the call (since it would be automatic and there would be no person waiting on the other end just yet, no harm in letting it ring for as long as possible), you're back to square one. Why isn't it already done this or a similar way? Surely such systems exist, even if not (yet) widely used?
Why not allow pressing numbers to change the music as you wait? And last, but not least: how hard is it to loop something properly? (I swear, some of that has to be on purpose, sadism is a better fitting explanation than incompetence.)
> Worse, companies are always tempted to impose on you while you wait – playing music on hold (does anybody actually like this?), or worse, nagging you about using the web site. We will see later on that this is especially pointless and stupid.
Well, they really really want you to use the website. For a lot of "they"'s. Not that they can manage to run that well, either, but it's still cheaper and "scales better". I agree it's stupid, I detested it not because of job security but because I hated the lame website and how pointless it was to try to make any suggestions "above my pay grade", but in their mind, there is a point, it's not just filler.
> But the big issue is management, and I think expectations. People expect the experience to be terrible. People expect the job to be status-reducing and generally horrible. People expect that because it’s a cost-centre, there’s no way to improve it other than flogging the slaves harder.
Yes. I was lucky in that I found a way to not reduce my status, but actually learn a lot about myself and people, but that's generally the pattern I saw.
Agreed with everything said here, I think the worst thing above all is that most call centers are outsourced and get paid by the amount of inbound calls taken per hour and hold time metrics. It like solved solutions are not even part of the equation at all, like it's not even in their game plan.
All the managers at these places are pretty uneducated and if you are working in the tech field, you are working with a bunch of people that know nothing about tech getting paid minimum wage, as anyone with the required skills is going to command a higher wage...
They belittle you by requiring you to ask permission to go to the washroom and to go on a 15 min break, which is bad enough, but what makes it worse is that usually the answer was "no, after your next call, ask me again". So it was normal to never get a break at some of these places. Although when they declined my requests to go to the washroom several times, I just said fuck it and went when I wanted.... and this is in Canada here....
The idea of assigning people to specific cases is one of the only ways to get something done right or at least know all the steps that were actually completed. Sadly most places didn't work that way as they "had" to squeeze in that extra call per hour. I'd regularly get in trouble for calling customers back, which to me is umm doing my job sufficiently.
I've found working for the company directly is much better then working for a 3rd party company. In those cases they care more about level of customer satisfaction. Out of all the major corps I've worked for Telus was adequate and Bell was the horrible.
having worked for many large companies in call centers I'll tell you why this happens,
In the call center, when you call in, our number one goal is to get you off the phone ASAP. Every major corp I've worked for never had a way to tell the status of the delivery via their in house software. In times like this we check the notes to see when the last time you called and just keep telling you to wait longer, say "it's sent" even though we have no way of knowing this, we are told flatout to lie.
The major reason is that delivery is outsourced to another company, who then themselves outsources it again to other drivers who will work for the least amount of money possible. So there is no direct way of contacting them or even knowing which sub company is doing the delivery.
All the managers are concerned about is you taking the next call. I have gotten in trouble multiple times for going out of my way to make sure the customer got everything completed properly. Soon as the customer hangs up your headset automatically takes another call, so you don't have time to fill out extra paper work to get what the customer actually needs completed cause you are told to do that "On your own time" and since you get paid minimum wage you don't give a shit if things get done or not due to the poisoned environment.
Now say a real incident happens where you must call the delivery driver, it CAN be done, just that they never tell the employees that because it takes "too long". Basically you call the 3rd party delivery company and tell them what's up and then it's their job to relay the message (if they even know who is doing the delivery!) So only under special circumstances can that be done.
No one cares about wasted effort or customer satisfaction, as long the hold times are low and they can employ the minimal amount of workers then they are doing there jobs...
Another thing, when you cancel your account and the company owes you money, you tell the customer 6-8 weeks to receive the refund. Now if the customer gets really angry and makes a big deal about it, then there is a little button we click on the screen that mails out the refund to the customer the next day! So why do they do that? because of all the interest they make with your money sitting longer in their bank account. This company had 3 internal accounts that had ~2 Million dollars in each of them, filled with customers money just waiting around to be sent out when the automated timer printed out a batch...
All the corporations I've worked for all operated like this, whether I was paid minimum wage or a decent 20$ an hour. I've only worked at one place where they genuinely cared about the customer, but it was small enough in that you had direct communication to everyone, but that place closed cause customer service costs too much money...
Why are you calling Company customer service for Courier problems? Yes, they'll try to help, but a CS rep at Nintendo (or any employee, for that matter) isn't going to be able to do anything to get FedEx back to your house when they've already left.
And can you imagine the logistics nightmare of multiple delivery attempts to the same address on the same day? For every courier that says they called when they didn't, there are people who will go shopping and come back at 3pm to see the slip, then call and complain.
I've had it happen to me where I'm sitting 4 feet away from my front door and I go out to find a slip on the door when they never knocked or rang the bell, but it's unreasonable to expect them to turn around and bring it back, just as it's unreasonable to think that maybe I just didn't hear it even though I was right there.
The moment regular company employees stop dealing with customer issues, delivery, etc., and hands it over to "specialists", it's basically a crap shoot whether you can get any issue resolved at all, because the systems they put in place make it nearly impossible.
For example: A courier claims they called at your house and got no answer, even though you were in and they didn't. You call customer services, but they have no way at all to contact the courier and tell them to go back and try again. Even if they're only two minutes down the road. The system deliberately puts a firewall between the reps and the delivery infrastructure, because any kind of ad-hoc action to resolve customer issues interferes with the logistics planning for the day's deliveries.
All the rep can do is rearrange delivery for the subsequent day, whereupon the problem often repeats itself, but this time with a different courier, and a different rep. I had this process repeat several times, over a period of weeks, until simply cancelled an order completely (one worth hundreds of pounds to the vendor).
I do wonder if higher level managers realise that delivery departments are optimising purely to make things easy for themselves, and what that's potentially worth in terms of wasted effort, lost orders and customer hostility. I guess they probably don't care, because it still saves them money on aggregate.