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Why can some companies get away with NO customer service?

A

Agentbolt

Diamond Member
After fighting with Verizon for 3 hours over the phone due to them (for some ungodly reason) deciding to overcharge my account 200 dollars, I need to ask: How come some companies can just consistently screw over customers and get away with it?

The main culprits I'm thinking of are :

A) Cell phone companies
B) Airline companies
C) Cable companies

Seriously, how come market forces don't seem to be at work here? Why is it that these companies that treat their customers like absolute, complete garbage continue to get away with it.

Cable companies are some of the worst. I should know, I work for Comcast. If I had a wooden nickel for every time we did something unspeakably horrible to our customers, I'd be rich (assuming wooden nickels are worth anything). Complaints about airline companies are old news, but seriously, you can't open a paper or bring up ATOT without seeing some new story about how United or American or whoever completely bent their customers over a barrel. Cell phone companies, again, routinely act as if their customers wronged them in some awful way in a previous life and they are exacting revenge on them.

CHeck the BBB sometime, there's probably more complaints against those three industries than the rest combined. Granted, those are 3 BIG industries, but it's still way out of proportion.

This was a half rant, half curiousity thread. I'm done.
 
Originally posted by: Agentbolt
I should know, I work for Comcast. If I had a wooden nickel for every time we did something unspeakably horrible to our customers, I'd be rich (assuming wooden nickels are worth anything).

I'm done.
Click to expand...

Not without telling us a few Comcast stories.

 
A> All of the cell phone companies have equally bad customer service. So even if you switch nothing gets better.

B> Service costs to much, for carriers that are going bankrupt already.

C> Cable companies usually have a monopoly for the area they are in. So you have no choice, take it up the arse or don't buy at all.
 
Originally posted by: Exodor
Originally posted by: Agentbolt
I should know, I work for Comcast. If I had a wooden nickel for every time we did something unspeakably horrible to our customers, I'd be rich (assuming wooden nickels are worth anything).

I'm done.
Click to expand...

Not without telling us a few Comcast stories.
Click to expand...

yes, do tell.
 
THe only one I will agree with you on is Comcast. I told them I was leaving for Japan and that i wanted to make sure all my bills were paid. Come back after 3 months and I get a call the day I get back(lucky eh?) saying that they have sent my bill to a collection agency. Obviously I am like WTF! Took me like 3 hours to work through their stupidity. I've had problems with both my Cell Phone and Airlines but the customer service was great. Actually United Airlines have been more then helpful and I would say they actual pleasant to do business with!
 
Unfortunately customer service is not taken seriously by most companies or by most consumers because the percentage of people that will actually stop using a service because of it's negatives is quite small compared to the percentage of the people who do nothing about it. I hear of negatives from people all the time but yet they continue to use what the companies offer.
 
Oh man, I've got some great ones. Most of them I can't tell here, but a good example is what we did in Florida.

We bought out Adelphia and Time Warner, and forced customers to switch to us. Shouldn't have been too big a deal, right? Wrong. Adelphia and Time Warner's nodes were somehow not playing nicely with our stuff, so customers routinely lost their internet connection for days, or even weeks at a time. We were getting this never ending stream of angry calls, so this is how Comcast elected to deal with it:

A) Not allowing people in "affected areas" to get in touch with tech support. If they called in from an area code that was in an area we knew to be offline, they'd get a recording saying that we were experiencing some difficulty, and to call back later. Then it'd hang up on them. Even if they'd been offline for like, a week.

B) After that, we started taking calls from people, and we explained to them that our terms of service don't guarantee uninterrupted service. So we basically told them "sit tight and we'll fix it when we fix it" when they called in. If they asked for a credit or some kind of restitution, we told them to cram it.

C) Eventually we were getting so inundated with angry phone calls that we started offering a pro-rated credit. Basically we took their monthly charge, divided it by the number of days they were out, and offered them that much credit. Only people whose internet was out for a week or longer were eligible, though. Try to imagine a week with no internet access at all, and your cable company telling you to sit there and take it when you called in to complain.

It was awful. I felt so bad for people calling in, because we were making absolutely no effort to help them. I can't even conceive of, say, a car company, or a department store doing this kind of stuff, and getting away with it.
 
Originally posted by: CrackRabbit
A> All of the cell phone companies have equally bad customer service. So even if you switch nothing gets better.

B> Service costs to much, for carriers that are going bankrupt already.

C> Cable companies usually have a monopoly for the area they are in. So you have no choice, take it up the arse or don't buy at all.
Click to expand...

Not true, I do debit card disputes all day for work. I can tell you from experience I do more Cingular chargebacks then anyone else by FAR probably 5x as much as the runner up which is Sprint. I rarely if ever have to do one for T-Mobile.

Is kind of like satalite companies, I do chargebacks at a 50:1 ratio for Dish vs DirecTV and DirecTV is the bigger company.

Of course I understand this is only one aspect of their customer service but I find it matches pretty well to their overall buisness practice.
 
Originally posted by: Agentbolt
Oh man, I've got some great ones. Most of them I can't tell here, but a good example is what we did in Florida.

We bought out Adelphia and Time Warner, and forced customers to switch to us. Shouldn't have been too big a deal, right? Wrong. Adelphia and Time Warner's nodes were somehow not playing nicely with our stuff, so customers routinely lost their internet connection for days, or even weeks at a time. We were getting this never ending stream of angry calls, so this is how Comcast elected to deal with it:

A) Not allowing people in "affected areas" to get in touch with tech support. If they called in from an area code that was in an area we knew to be offline, they'd get a recording saying that we were experiencing some difficulty, and to call back later. Then it'd hang up on them. Even if they'd been offline for like, a week.

B) After that, we started taking calls from people, and we explained to them that our terms of service don't guarantee uninterrupted service. So we basically told them "sit tight and we'll fix it when we fix it" when they called in. If they asked for a credit or some kind of restitution, we told them to cram it.

C) Eventually we were getting so inundated with angry phone calls that we started offering a pro-rated credit. Basically we took their monthly charge, divided it by the number of days they were out, and offered them that much credit. Only people whose internet was out for a week or longer were eligible, though. Try to imagine a week with no internet access at all, and your cable company telling you to sit there and take it when you called in to complain.

It was awful. I felt so bad for people calling in, because we were making absolutely no effort to help them. I can't even conceive of, say, a car company, or a department store doing this kind of stuff, and getting away with it.
Click to expand...

Well they can do that because the barriers to entry in the industry are so high. I mean no one else can really take their turf. A lot of people can't get DSL or don't want it cause it is slower. So yeah your choice is Comcast with ****** service, or dial up...

I choose comcast.
 
I worked a DTV when they did the mass card frying thing to curb pirates (over 10,000 cards), and the call center lit up. We went from 10-20 mins between calls to a queue of 300+ overnight. As usual we (customer service reps) were given some corporate BS to tell the customers, but everyone knew what happened. To make matters worse during that same time period we had some IT thing screw up our entire system. I bet some IT guys lost their jobs, but the Execs that chose to fry the cards never even admitted faulted let alone receive any punishment.
 
Companies can screw people because people will sign their lives away without reading what they sign.

Define customer service for us, please.

I mean, if you say that customer service is givng the customer what they want, even if it means losing money, they it's obvious why some companies don't budge.

If you think customer service is giving the customer a valid answer and/or pointing them in the right direction to get an answer, then there are only a select few companies that I haven't had good customer service from.

Anyone that has worked a job that deals directly with the customer can tell you that if you are polite when you need to be, or keep working your way up the ladder, that you will get what you want provided it's fair and reasonable. When customers demand outlandish things because of honest mistakes they have no right to bitch when they don't get them. In my fast food days, you'd be surprised (or maybe not) how many people demanded their money back for their entire family's meal because one item was made incorrectly. That's absurd. Whenever you buy something or get some sort of service, it's reasonable to expect that along the lines something will go wrong. Cable will go out, billing departments will make mistakes, creditors will not receive your mail until after the due date... Like I said, if you give them a chance to fix a problem of their's, usually you will get it fixed. If you expect them to fix a problem of your's, don't be surprised if they won't accept responsibility.
 
Originally posted by: Agentbolt
Oh man, I've got some great ones. Most of them I can't tell here, but a good example is what we did in Florida.

We bought out Adelphia and Time Warner, and forced customers to switch to us. Shouldn't have been too big a deal, right? Wrong. Adelphia and Time Warner's nodes were somehow not playing nicely with our stuff, so customers routinely lost their internet connection for days, or even weeks at a time. We were getting this never ending stream of angry calls, so this is how Comcast elected to deal with it:

A) Not allowing people in "affected areas" to get in touch with tech support. If they called in from an area code that was in an area we knew to be offline, they'd get a recording saying that we were experiencing some difficulty, and to call back later. Then it'd hang up on them. Even if they'd been offline for like, a week.

B) After that, we started taking calls from people, and we explained to them that our terms of service don't guarantee uninterrupted service. So we basically told them "sit tight and we'll fix it when we fix it" when they called in. If they asked for a credit or some kind of restitution, we told them to cram it.

C) Eventually we were getting so inundated with angry phone calls that we started offering a pro-rated credit. Basically we took their monthly charge, divided it by the number of days they were out, and offered them that much credit. Only people whose internet was out for a week or longer were eligible, though. Try to imagine a week with no internet access at all, and your cable company telling you to sit there and take it when you called in to complain.

It was awful. I felt so bad for people calling in, because we were making absolutely no effort to help them. I can't even conceive of, say, a car company, or a department store doing this kind of stuff, and getting away with it.
Click to expand...

Dude, same thing in LA. EXCEPT, you didn't get a recording. You were just put on hold. For an hour. And then disconnected. No message saying call back later, just dialtone.
 
Define customer service for us, please
Click to expand...

I'm not sure if you're looking too deep into this or being obtuse or what, but I'm talking about the generally accepted definition of customer service. "Try to screw your customers as little a possible, fix the mistakes you do make." I'm not talking about bending over backwards to give customers every single little thing they want.

The three industries I've pointed out go FAR and beyond most others in terms of completely lacking in even the slightest bit of decency towards their customers. I'm not saying they should start granting every wish of every insane customer, it'd just be nice if they stopped taking a big ol' dump right on our faces. Most of the time free market forces would cause companies run the way these are (in terms of customer service) to go out of business, but somehow they get away with it. That's all.
 
It's important to realize they're not supposed to be your friends. Imagine if you had that job. I don't think I could stand more than an hour being on the phone with anyone (helping with the same old problems over and over). If you put yourself in the CS reps' shoes, you may realize it's not that bad.

After awhile they do get tired of acting like every customer that calls them has changed their world in some great way. I've never had them be obtuse to me. Only reasonable.
 
Originally posted by: Agentbolt
Define customer service for us, please
Click to expand...

I'm not sure if you're looking too deep into this or being obtuse or what, but I'm talking about the generally accepted definition of customer service. "Try to screw your customers as little a possible, fix the mistakes you do make." I'm not talking about bending over backwards to give customers every single little thing they want.

The three industries I've pointed out go FAR and beyond most others in terms of completely lacking in even the slightest bit of decency towards their customers. I'm not saying they should start granting every wish of every insane customer, it'd just be nice if they stopped taking a big ol' dump right on our faces. Most of the time free market forces would cause companies run the way these are (in terms of customer service) to go out of business, but somehow they get away with it. That's all.
Click to expand...

Well, I was just merely implying that "customer service" can mean a few things. Like I said, to some people it means merely helping them find the answer to their questions, whether it was the answer they were hoping for or not, and to some people it means making the customer happy no matter what it takes. Whereas with other people, it's quite all encompassing... everything from billing, to sales, to tech support, literally all interaction the company has with the customer.

Sometimes I think the problem lies in the fact that a lot of companies have truly automated systems now, and so many people don't watching their statements enough to help them catch errors... they really only have a problem when there is a huge oversight. The average person won't waste 10 minutes of their life on the phone to find out why a bill was $5 higher than the previous month without notice, but they want to physically assault someone before making any calls when the bill is off by $100.

Sometimes I don't think people read their contracts and understand that things like "unlimted bandwidth" or "unlimited text messages" are unlimited in the same terms they are thinking of. Like I said earlier, you always have to assume that a company will have issues at some point, and you can't blindly sign things without being sure.
If a salesperson tells you something, it's because they want to make the sale. What they say and what you hear aren't always the same.

I'm not going to sit here and say that companies don't screw people over, but I think a lot of times people get upset because they are too unwilling that they screwed up. Like previously mentioned, "unlimited text messages" isn't the same as the customer hears. Sure, you can send as many as you want in a month. Nobody is going to stop you. But only 500 are included in the price of the plan. It's there in the contract that you signed.

Your cable went out? We're sorry. But we don't owe you a month's worth of cable for free just because it was out for a day or two. It says in the contract that outages do occur and they aren't liable for them. Don't like it? Don't sign the contract. Nobody is forcing you to buy their services... or any other company's similar service.

I really don't like playing the devil's advocate, but you gotta understand that for every legitimate call that a call center gets about a real crappy situation, they probably get 5 more of people calling trying to get some freebie or calling because they are too dumb to understand what they are buying.

But back to the original question... how can some companies get away with it? Because in most situations, their customer base is so large that screwing over even 3-5% of their customers or not satisfying them in any way won't break the bank. It's both an acceptable and expected practice of business in a capitalist economy. Truth be told, it probably helps weed out some of the more high-risk customers that will cause an eventual loss in revenue. As great as it is for a company to please everyone, they bigger a company gets, the less chance they have of being able to satisfy each and every one of their customers. There will never be any company that satisfies 100% of it's customers forever. Take Newegg for example. For the longest time they were the best of the best. You had to look hard to find a complaint that wasn't made right and then some by them. Then they got much, much bigger, and now they've started slacking a bit.
 
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