Slashdot Mirror
When Customer Dissatisfaction Is a Tech Business Model
jammag writes: A new trend has emerged where tech companies have realized that abusing users pays big. Examples include the highly publicized Comcast harassing service call, Facebook "experiments," Twitter timeline tinkering, rude Korean telecoms — tech is an area where the term "customer service" has an Orwellian slant. Isn't it time customer starting fleeing abusive tech outfits?
Where are customers supposed to flee to? Many of these companies are de facto monopolies in many areas or at the very least in lock-step with their "competitors." There aren't very many choices for tech companies unless you want to do without, which is unpalatable for many.
Required comment: the big corps have won. Deal with it.
Remember, if something is free you aren't the customer, you are the product and so long as they're not pissing off their advertisers these companies can do anything that doesn't significantly reduce their user counts.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
bought-and-paid-for politicians using the law to favor their friends isn't "the free market"
I find it funny how people who defend capitalism in this day and age like to say that what we have is "crony capitalism" and if we'd just give real capitalism a try for once it would be super awesome.
What does that sound like?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The best (most profitable) customer is the one that can be bullied into puting up with your bullshit. The demanding ones, the ones who know how the service should work and cause trouble when it doesn't measure up are worth getting rid of.
Thank you, sir. May I have another?
Have gnu, will travel.
Good customer service is expensive.
Good customer service is less expensive than bad customer service. A smaller call center staffed with decently trained and compensated CSRs is far more cost effective than watching the headcount continuously grow and churn to deal with the increased call volume due to poorly trained staff dumping calls, permaholds, supervisor escalations, previous callers figuring out they've been lied to, etc. At some point, your call center will outgrow its allotted space, and then you'll have to deal with a costly move or additional locations. Both companies I worked for experienced this, one of them had to move TWICE in 4 years, and the cost was mindblowing. Then, as you lose a lot of your customers, there's the cost of downsizing.. all of which could have been avoided by just properly hiring, training, and compensating a solid, core group of people to take care of your customers and make sure they didn't become unhappy with the thought of giving you their money.
Isn't it time customer starting fleeing abusive tech outfits?
Fleeing to where? Some other company where the service is just as bad or worse?
I'm currently displeased with T-Mobile and the lies they told me about their "no overages fees" promise. I walked into AT&T and asked "how much to put your SIM in my phone?"
"$20 a month for 300Mb data, unlimited talk/text". Oh, ok!
"Plus $25/month to use a phone with that service." WTF? You can buy a service that requires a phone and then charge EXTRA to be able to use a phone with it? MY own phone, to boot?
I could understand if you were adding additional devices to the service (two phones sharing one plan, e.g.). I could understand a charge to get a phone from them. But I consider it dishonest to separate out the plan from any devices that you need to have to use that service. It makes the cost look artificially low.
$20/month! Great deal. $45/month, not so good anymore.
Adding in that they charge for texts coming through the email to SMS gateway despite being "unlimited text", the service was more expensive for less product. I could choose to send a message to T-Mobile but it would wind up costing me more per month, and I have no reason to believe that AT&T's customer service is any better than T-Mobile's.
So, it is likely that the idea of fleeing companies with bad customer service would only result in increased thrashing as 100 people move from company A to company B and 100 move from B to A, and 200 people find out that neither one is any good at helping them, and 200 people find out that they couldn't get as good a deal at their new provider as they had at the old.
There is also the issue of the devil you know vs. the one you don't. AT&T may have better service, but they probably don't, and I already know how bad T-Mobile is. Changing providers for no benefit, added cost, and potentially no better service is a lose for me and T-Mobile probably wouldn't even notice.