Customer Support is Terrible

Over a year ago, I ordered a large amount of food through a food delivery app. Two hours later it still hadn’t arrived. It turned out, the restaurant was incapable of dealing with such a large order in any reasonable amount of time. Instead of contacting me to tell me the food would be very delayed, the delivery app never got in touch. Even though I tried to write their customer support multiple times.

Eventually – a little over two hours later – they wrote to tell me my food would be ready in another half an hour. I told them it was too late, and I would like a refund, since we had now gone elsewhere to eat. They told me that would not be possible, but they could refund me the delivery fee (about 2% of the total order). I told them to stuff it, and uninstalled their app.

It feels like the same thing every time. You go on the website of whatever company you’re trying to reach. If you’re lucky there is a ‘Contact’-button somewhere, or maybe just a footer at the bottom, with the information you need. Sometimes there is an unhelpful ‘chatbot’ that acts as a proxy-google. Oftentimes that only lead to linking you other support pages, or asking if you’re read their FAQ.

            Every once in a while, you will not be lucky enough to find any contact information, instead resorting to googling “COMPANY NAME contact”. This is usually an omen of the service level ahead.

I like to speak with a human, when it comes to needing assistance from a company. A lot of companies, however, apparently do not like their employees to actually speak to customers. Instead, they will greet you with an automated voice telling you your options. The worst of these will put dead ends in their system, by adding options that lead to the phone-man telling you to check their website for solutions to that problem.

At this point I’m usually considering quitting modern society to go live in the woods.

But even if you make it through and happen to get a person who is actually working full-time for the company you want, and not just an outsourced call-centre in a different country, you’re still so often running your head against a brick wall. And there is nothing to do. You ask why your coffeemaker no longer works, and learn that since you have not downloaded the latest firmware it has now shut down ‘for your security’.

            When you say “That’s the stupidest thing, I’ve heard in my entire life and I watched Behind the Curve.” they tell you “Sorry, but I’m unable to do anything on my end.” Which is fair right? We can hardly expect the customer support rep to march into the CEO’s office (let’s be real, they’re not even in the same building), and demand they change corporate strategy. But this still doesn’t fix your issue.

And that’s the idea. Fixing things requires resources.  But telling people that you can’t fix it requires a lot less. Of course, you, the CEO, don’t want to actually take the heat for your own terrible business-strategy, so you hire someone else, to sit all day, and tell people their coffeemakers need to be connected to the internet at all times. And that leaves consumers in a bad place.

            No one is going to be impressed you, the customer, yelled at customer support. It’s not a good look, and it’s mostly an exercise in futility anyway. But what else is there to do? The system is designed to never actually let you interact with any of the people, who have decision-making power. They’re all too busy. And your complaints are too costly to fix.

            I don’t condone yelling at the customer support rep, but I do believe you are allowed to be angry, when you’re being mistreated by a company. And if the only way the company allows you to interact with them is through a support rep, then voicing your discontent to that person is fair. In fact, as far as that conversation goes, they are the company.

It's hard not to think of this situation, as a consequence of the conglomerate powers that have arisen across the globe. If I have a problem with my local butcher’s wares, I go down there and speak to him, and we can work it out in person. If I have a problem with a Samsung product, well that’s just tough. I can go to the electronics store I bought it from, and they can tell me, that’s between me and the product manufacturer. I can call a Samsung customer support number, and some underpaid support rep with no technical knowledge of the product can read from their script.

It's just not feasible to help thousands of people every day in a hands-on manner. These companies have grown so large they can no longer realistically satisfy all their customers. Instead, they must simply look at how little they can do to help customers, without losing the business of a significant margin. I imagine it helps that all their competition is doing the same.

Normally I like to argue some alternative solutions to the issue, but in this case, I find it hard to think of any achievable goal. The EU has one of the best track-records of strongarming global companies into treating consumers with a modicum of respect, but even if we could make them, there simply doesn’t appear to be a solution that can be done.

            The Head of the Whatever Department, which is able to make the changes needed, will never be able to answer the hordes of people who have problems. And – sadly – I don’t have a local mom-and-pop electronics manufacturer. Defeatist as it sounds, I think we will have to accept this lack of connection as a function of our modern world. All we can do is punish the worst offenders by switching our future purchases elsewhere.

And while I’ve had plenty of food delivered since, it does give me a small pleasure, that none of it has been through the unhelpful delivery service for more than a year.