from Hacker News

How did customer service get so bad?

by bishopsmother on 4/21/24, 12:03 PM with 54 comments

  • by PaulDavisThe1st on 4/21/24, 4:06 PM

    In the earliest days at amazon, we had a customer who had placed an order for several books. One of the books was no longer available, and when we notified the customer, they wanted to replace it with a different book that cost more than the original. They had paid by check (!) for the original order, but wanted to use a credit card to pay the difference.

    Myself and the other founding programmer groaned - our system was not designed to have multiple payments via different payment systems for a single order, nor to handle cases of a partial payment that did not correspond to the value of an entire order.

    Bezos said "this just has to work for the customer, we have to tell them "sure, no problem", today, tomorrow and forever".

    I'm not proud of what Amazon has done or become, and there is much to criticize or even protest about. But this level of committment to customer service, to whatever extent it has actually survived the last 30 years - that's something that was both eye opening to me and something to be just a tiny bit proud of.

  • by mrweasel on 4/21/24, 4:03 PM

    Part of it, for me, also seems to be an increasing desire to prevent customers from solving their own problems or even admitting fault. In a discussion regarding using AI chat bots to handle the easier customer service requests, someone pointed that if the questions are simple enough that the bot can do it, then it could just have been an online form. Many companies don't even want to do that, they'll refer to self service, but not actually provide it for anything that might be an expense.

    About a year ago I had to contact customer service, because my internet was out, so was the internet for 400 of other homes in the area. The ISP did nothing to provide any information, no status page, nor did they in fact know that there was an issue, to customer service these where 400 separate calls. Every single person could sit in a 3 hour queue to inform customer service about the exact same issue. This could easily have been a button on their website saying: "Hey my fiber is down" or an update status page.

    If you can't do customer service correctly, then you either have to many customers, or to many products (complex products). Funny enough, there always seems to be time to attempt an up-sell. "Would you like to hear about our streaming package" .... Dude, I just told you, my fiber connection has been down for two weeks, I'm calling because your status page is giving me no information, right now might not be the best time.

  • by keepitsimplem8 on 4/21/24, 3:28 PM

    "data shows that over 30 per cent of people would pay more for a product or service if they received exceptional customer care."

    The solid majority wins.

    Airlines take a lot of heat for poor customer service, but most customers will purchase the cheapest possible ticket no matter what.

    Be the change you want to see in the world...if all customers collectively decided to do business only with companies that provided excellent customer service...then excellent customer service would become ubiquitous outside of large monopolies and government agencies.

    In other words...it's only a problem if you consider it a problem that people in general want the best of everything, but for cheap or free. I don't.

  • by wNjdbfm on 4/21/24, 3:41 PM

    Tangentially related: My wife worked in customer service for a few years remotely and would regularly vent to me about it. One of the interesting things that she said is that we are training an annoyingly large subset of customers that if they just make themselves annoying enough they get free stuff. Eventually the company decides to reward their craziness by caving to their demands and creating a weird incentive dynamic which repeats. Obviously I can’t give specifics but she said the % of her day spent on people in that category grew steadily over the years she was in that line of work. Anyone else in that area experience similar?

  • by landedgentry on 4/21/24, 4:00 PM

    There is a huge asymmetry in costs. When an issue arises, the customer has to spend an inordinate amount of time and effort to fix it, but for the company, the problem actually benefits them (e.g. a billing mistake, refunds for a cancelled flight, saving customer support costs).

    Company profits increase and stock goes up, but customers' lost weekdays and weekends are not measured.

  • by MuffinFlavored on 4/21/24, 4:10 PM

    1. Businesses no longer have to bend over backwards to stake their name on customer service. Starbucks can take 30 minutes to do a mobile order multiple times and millions of people will still go pay $6 for coffee every day.

    2. Most people working these jobs are upset/miserable/hate their lives due to "America problems". If you make less than $60k/yr, chances are your life is very unfulfilling. You are constantly stressed about money, you might be in debt/behind on your bills. You have to work at least 32-40 hours a week at a job you wish you didn't. Your soul is beat down. You hate your co-workers + manager. You can't afford to own anything. You use social media/sports to escape the monotony of your life. You probably don't have great health care. You are probably not in great shape statistically and a victim of the high fat, high calorie, high sugar, low nutritional content American diet. You trade your sanity and freedom for a paycheck that can barely buy you anything. So what do you do? Take it out on customers. Why? Because you can get away with it, because your company/manager is desperate for employees (which is weird, you think this would lead to higher wages supply/demand wise)

    We probably have an oversupply of people who can do customer-service level work, so you can be rude without fear of your manager caring.

    In the past week I've picked up food multiple times. Wasn't greeted, no smile, was barely acknowledged, if employees do say "thank you" as we leave a restaurant, they're looking down at their phone while scrolling TikTok/Instagram. Nothing wrong with, just not the "glory days" of customer service.

    It all depends on the company/management. If management tolerates rude employees and empowers their employees to be rude to customers/be on their phone, it's a "top-down" decision.

  • by sema4hacker on 4/21/24, 3:30 PM

    I'll always remember how my German brother-in-law found that when he arrived in America, retail store clerks were always eager to offer help, but actually didn't know anything about the products being sold and were untrained and basically useless.

  • by kitd on 4/21/24, 3:29 PM

    customer problems are more complex and organisations need staff who are trained to deal with a wider range of issue

    I think this is a function of the complexity of products being offered by service companies.

    In the rush to differentiate themselves from their competitors, they end up providing so many variants or extras on top of the core product that still need support and problem resolution, and that all falls on the poor CS rep.

  • by generalpf on 4/21/24, 2:39 PM

  • by ergonaught on 4/21/24, 4:30 PM

    1) Because vast hordes of people have become horribly confused about the purpose of business, so when they start optimizing for "making money" they get everything that is actually the purpose wrong.

    2) Because people need jobs, apparently, so vast hordes of people who shouldn't be in a particular job (because they don't care about it) are doing it anyway, with predictable outcomes. Certainly related to #1.

    3) Because mass consumers don't care, and if your decision-making capacity has been shattered by #1 and #2, you won't care, either, because ultimately you don't know what you're doing, you don't know why, and you don't care.

    4) Humans do not know how to scale. This exacerbates the above.

    5) Stupidity is a much bigger problem than you can probably recognize. This exacerbates the above.

  • by hammock on 4/21/24, 3:43 PM

    In my view customer service has never been better. I’ve always been able to get a human on the phone wherever I am trying to call, and by being polite and considerate can most often get exactly what I want. In other cases, livechat - as long as you are willing to multitask and go back and forth to the chat for an hour - has freed up a lot of my time so I don’t have to be stuck on a hold phoneline.

    Maybe this issue is like search engines, where they can be really frustrating to use if you don’t know the right things to say to them.

  • by jbverschoor on 4/21/24, 8:00 PM

    Checkboxes, tasks, wrong kpis, remote warriors (keyboard or phone)

  • by JamesAdir on 4/21/24, 4:30 PM

    Here's the fixed version with improved style and grammar:

    I blame it on the influencers. People aged 18-26 used to work in retail or customer service. It sucked, but it was the only option for talented individuals. So you gained a varied experience. The pay was also enough to provide a living wage.

    Nowadays, the pay is meager, so capable people find opportunities elsewhere. Those who are left behind are bombarded with messages like, "You're wasting your life," and "You could be a travel blogger," etc.

    In many countries, instead of customer service or retail, numerous people have turned to delivery services since they allow more autonomy and no physical contact with customers. I actually think social media has made the human experience worse rather than improved it.

  • by citizenpaul on 4/21/24, 4:37 PM

    Customer service was a marketing technique aimed at the baby boomers. It was used to lower friction of a high spending customers at any absurd level of babying the customer to avoid them having to experience difficulties. As the baby boomers have aged and are no longer really needing "things" the baby boomer money has moved to healthcare. Now customer service as a product will return to policy level since there is no longer any monetary benefit for the poorer millennial and continuing generations.

    In all of history customer service has been handled the real way. The proprietor or their employees sized you up for how much they thought you could spend and then provided the amount of customer service they thought they needed to get your outsized spending. If you seemed low income they simply said take it or leave it and did not care if you left. This is still the way it is done in the overwhelming majority of the world.

    TLDR. Customer service declining is a result of the huge baby boomer generation dying and there no longer being a group that is able/willing to pay double the price for avoiding any inconvenience or rudeness.

  • by bradgranath on 4/21/24, 10:01 PM