The Death of Customer Service...

[SmashMan]

Re: The Death of Customer Service...

has or did have a return policy where you could return things at any point or any reason.

[AUChase]

Re: The Death of Customer Service...

The phrase “the customer is always right” is one that no company should ever instill in its employees.




Sent from my iPhone using Operation Sports

I've been down this road in fast food and retail both.

Fast food one time this lady ordered a "country style fish" meal so we cooked it up and gave it to her. She ate 2 of the 3 pieces of fish and then brought it back and said it wasn't any good. I didn't want to remake it, but the manager made me do it.


Home Depot I was working returns and they have a no return policy on custom tinted/colored paint. This lady brings back a gallon of paint and I open it.. over half of the gallon was gone. I told the lady I couldn't return it so she started getting pissed and asked to see a manager. Assistant manager comes out and a few minutes later she threatens him to the point where he just bows down and told me to return it.

Why have a ****ing policy in place and then not let me enforce the rule?

I don't miss working in either of those types of businesses. I don't think I could go back either.

[countryboy]

Re: The Death of Customer Service...

I think I would straight up hurt someone if I had to go back to work retail or food industry these days. In my older age, I don't play well with others and I'm getting to the point where I bite..

[tdawg3782]

Re: The Death of Customer Service...

I've been down this road in fast food and retail both.

Fast food one time this lady ordered a "country style fish" meal so we cooked it up and gave it to her. She ate 2 of the 3 pieces of fish and then brought it back and said it wasn't any good. I didn't want to remake it, but the manager made me do it.


Home Depot I was working returns and they have a no return policy on customer tinted/colored paint. This lady brings back a gallon of paint and I open it.. over half of the gallon was gone. I told the lady I couldn't return it so she started getting pissed and asked to see a manager. Assistant manager comes out and a few minutes later she threatens him to the point where he just bows down and told me to return it.

Why have a ****ing policy in place and then not let me enforce the rule?

I don't miss working in either of those types of businesses. I don't think I could go back either.

I've worked in retail all my life. Produce Manager at a grocery store. Nothing worse then following company policy to then have a store manager come over and completely not follow said policy. Making you out to be the *******. Now I just say that decision is over my pay grade and send them straight to the store manager.

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[Majingir]

Re: The Death of Customer Service...

The unfortunate part for stores, they have to suck it up.

Who's more likely to give a review? Someone who had a great shopping experience, or one who had a bad one?

Although it goes both ways at times. You definitely see people on the other side who act like they are always right.

I've gone to stores and restaurants before where they might have a special(or combo), but the person at the cash disagrees.

Happened at a grocery one time. I was buying something, it was on sale, the price rang up as the sale price, but suddenly the cashier is like "that cant be right", and acts like they can override the advertised price of the store.

[Majingir]

Re: The Death of Customer Service...

Didnt want to make the post any bigger so I'll double post.


I think I might have mentioned it before, but people intentionally open boxes trying to get discounts.

They'll open the box, go to the cashier, be like "I found this box open. Do I get a discount?".

And apparently theres "inside jobs" where employees at times open boxes, get it discounted and then their friend might buy up the discounted products and just sell them in perfect condition online.

[pietasterp]

Re: The Death of Customer Service...

I think we would all agree there are bad actors on both sides. It's probably related to some larger macro trends in society, but that's getting outside the purview of this thread (or any internet thread to be honest).

Having worked in retail, I'd agree that there is an increasing level of entitled behavior that at least appears more onerous than ever before. But that's a different problem than a lack of customer service. I don't think any reasonable person thinks a store or employee is supposed to bend over backward to make your every whim and wish come true. I do, however, think attention to a basic level of customer service is somewhat lacking in general across almost all levels of retail, although certainly at the bottom end (which is of course to be expected).

On the one hand, you have the anecdotes related above in this thread of bad faith customers. On the other hand, have you ever had to call Comcast for any reason?

Also, I think there's a difference between in-store brick-and-mortar customer service and call/internet-based customer service. In general, the former seems at least reasonable on most occasions, whereas the latter is almost universally an exercise in blood pressure control.

[ASB37]

Re: The Death of Customer Service...

Funny enough I was reading this thread last week and then had a mind blowing customer service experience over the weekend. Long post incoming.

Ebay had a discount code pop up on my homepage where I would get 10% off for any orders over $100. There was no fine print on the pop up, it just said add items to cart, then apply code on the cart page to get the discount.

Great, I have been trying to up my retro game collection and I needed a bunch of random manuals and boxes to complete some old stuff I found at my parents house recently. I go through and add like 13 items that total around $130 and they all show up on my cart. Awesome, I'm ready to go. I click the checkout button and as the next page loads only 6 of the items appear in my cart. I chat online with ebay support. Agent tells me they can see the 13 items in my cart and see that when I go to checkout 7 of them disappear. They look into it and claim that they are having issues with the checkout function on the site and that instead of waiting for it to be resolved on their end I can call into their checkout support and they will somehow manually add the code.

No issues up to this point, things happen I get it and it seemed like they were accommodating and offered a quick reasonable solution. Then I called into the support number and the nightmare began.

I get an agent, explain the issue and she looks into it. She comes back and informs me that the issue is not with their checkout page like the chat agent said, but rather there is an issue with the coupon code itself. That seems weird to me because my issue is that items are disappearing from my cart when I go to the checkout page, it's not that I am getting an error when I try to enter the code. In fact, I wasn't even trying to use the code because with the 6 items in my cart I did not meet the $100 threshold for the code to apply.

Anyway she goes through the usual B.S. customer support troubleshooting steps. Clear website history. Restart browser. Log out and log in. Restart computer, etc. After 20 minutes of this I'm starting to get a little annoyed but I get that they have a script they need to follow. After going through all the steps and seeing the issue still exists she puts me on hold and says she is going to find the "best available solution." She comes back after awhile and informs me she discovered the reason for the items disappearing from my cart is that some sellers have an account preference that won't allow their items to be added to a buyer's cart with other items. As some of the items I had in my cart apparently came from some of these seller's that is why those items were vanishing from my cart.

Ok, I guess that makes sense. She advises me that I would have to add items from seller's who do not have this preference on their account in order to allow me to move to the checkout page without items disappearing. At this point, I am frustrated. The coupon code made no mention of this issue, and I don't ever recall seeing anything on an items listing that displayed whether or not it was being sold with this preference. I ask the agent how I would be able to tell if an item I was looking for had this preference so I could avoid adding it to my cart. She then told me that the only way to know would be to access the seller's account by logging in to their account, or by being a member of ebay who could access the account. I ask her if there was anyway for a potential buyer to see this information and she told me no.

By now I'm dumbfounded. I repeat to her that her "best" solution was for me to add items to my cart that I had no way of knowing/seeing if the seller had this preference. She confirmed that it was indeed the only solution available. I'm like 40 minutes in at this point and ask to speak to a supervisor. I found myself going around in circles and wanted to talk to someone about manually adding this coupon code in like what was first told to me in the chat. After 10 minutes of holding a supervisor comes on and informs me that the reason items are disappearing from my cart is because I have 11 different sellers and the ebay system only allows for checkout from 10 sellers. He informs me if I remove one of the sellers items from my cart it should work.

I remove a seller. Go to checkout. And the same thing happens.

At this point I've wasted an hour of my time and just hang up the phone.

I ended up playing around with items in my cart until I found enough stuff that showed up on the checkout page that added up to over $100 so the code could apply. I guess I will never know which of the three issues they gave me was the real culprit.

This is my biggest issue with customer support that is based overseas. Whether it's Verizon, sprint, ebay, etc. I feel like they basically just BS you until you either hang up/give up, or they can pawn you off to another department/person.

tldr- had issue with ebay coupon code, talked to three different support people who all told me the issue was due to something else, none of their proposed solutions worked, one of the solutions was something they admitted I would not be able to even do, eventually got fed up and hung up.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: The Death of Customer Service...

I called Comcast yesterday trying to see if I could get upgraded to gig internet. The guy said it would be some extra money per month for the upgrade, plus a $60 one time installation fee. I said what is happening during the installation, he said the guy has to check to see if the building is eligible and my equipment is up to par. I already know it is so I asked if I did this could I get the fee waived if he comes out here and says everything is good to go. They said no, the installation fee is nonrefundable. I said I'll think about it and call back.

Called back today asking for the same thing, different rep. He says he can check online if my building is eligible, it was. He says I may need a Comcast modem, I asked if he could check to see if the modem I have now will work, he had to ask someone else but it does (I knew it would because I looked into this before). Anyway, 5 minutes later and my modem is rebooted with my new speed.

I don't know what happened, if the other guy was reading off a script or something but there was no way I was paying any instalation fee smh. All these one time activation fees, installation fees, it's a racket I swear.

[slickdtc]

Re: The Death of Customer Service...

Yeah, and the dude who actually helped you is getting ripped for “losing” the company money and other guy is being promoted because he can take 100 calls an hour.

The game is rigged. Lol

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: The Death of Customer Service...

They were going to pay an installer to go there just to see if your building was eligible and to check your modem? For a $60 setup fee?

Talk about inefficiency in operations and expenses. Not exactly surprising considering who is it, but it's just comical that these giant companies became the behemoths they are and still operate poorly.

[Speedy]

Re: The Death of Customer Service...

tldr- had issue with ebay coupon code, talked to three different support people who all told me the issue was due to something else, none of their proposed solutions worked, one of the solutions was something they admitted I would not be able to even do, eventually got fed up and hung up.

I could see where perhaps the coupon person found the issue and it wasn't specific to coupons...but when you got a different answer from the SV, that's out the window.

That "exception" just feels odd. It's not due to a coupon, if you never had a coupon you still couldn't buy it...its just perhaps a gate to get out of huge discounts withthese codes so why you got directed in the first place.



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[p_rushing]

Re: The Death of Customer Service...

I wish all companies would model their in person customer service like Chickfila does. Think if Walmart, Target, etc had polite, smiling faces instead of people who hated being at work every minute they were there. Phone support will never be good because they only care about costs so they use offshore.

For Amazon, you can select certain reasons for calls to get in US reps.

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[ASB37]

Re: The Death of Customer Service...

I could see where perhaps the coupon person found the issue and it wasn't specific to coupons...but when you got a different answer from the SV, that's out the window.

That "exception" just feels odd. It's not due to a coupon, if you never had a coupon you still couldn't buy it...its just perhaps a gate to get out of huge discounts withthese codes so why you got directed in the first place.



Sent from my SM-G950U using Operation Sports mobile app

Yeah, I mean I buy a ton of things off amazon and whenever I have an issue pop up once in a while I have to deal with a few agents so I get maybe two different people not being on the same page and just trying to throw solutions out there to see what works. This thing with eBay was bizarre. It felt like they were just killing time until I just gave up. The supervisor's reason made the most sense to me so I hoped that his solution would work.

When I was given the solution over the phone by the initial agent that I would have to find items sold by sellers without the "bunching" preference, only to be told that I had no way of actually finding or searching for those type of items I was really dumbfounded.

The coupon had a $100 minimum so you would have to foresee there would be other people lumping multiple items in the cart to hit the minimum. Sort of hard for me to believe they would not see this issue coming up, but maybe I'm being too logical.

Would have made more sense (and probably would be logistically easier) if they just said the code was good for the purchase of any single item over $100.

[Gotmadskillzson]

Re: The Death of Customer Service...

They were going to pay an installer to go there just to see if your building was eligible and to check your modem? For a $60 setup fee?

Talk about inefficiency in operations and expenses. Not exactly surprising considering who is it, but it's just comical that these giant companies became the behemoths they are and still operate poorly.

Hell I heard stories of them charging people installation fees for people self installing who picked up the modem themselves directly from the Comcast store. Many people just accept it without making a fuss about it.