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?
Don't worry guys, the free market fairy will take care of it.
"Twitter timeline tinkering" is abusive? That's a bit of a stretch.
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.
The only way to flee is to have an alternative. And despite all of the wanna-bes, there are no real quality alternatives.
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.
Cable companies are granted "franchises" in most cities. If you want fast internet net you have no choice.
Add to the fact that we have been in a race to the bottom for customer service for a long time. You average slashdot reader calls anything that is available cheaper from china on Ebay over priced.
The constantly want free as in beer software.
And yet complain over bad customer support.
Back in the long dark history of computers I worked in a computer store. We had a large margin on the computers so we took the time help people learn how to use them. Today their is probably $10 margin on your typical PC and yet you wonder why companies farm out support.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
...they are the product. Need more repeating?
Don't worry guys, the free market fairy will take care of it.
The free market has taken care of it. Good customer service is expensive. Consumers have demonstrated that they are unwilling to pay additional money for good customer service. Successful companies have aborted customer service to keep prices low.
Right after the BP oil spill, I stood outside my house and watched cars go into an AM/PM for gas. Right across the road was a Shell (not that Shell is innocent or anything). I thought to myself "BP just did a Bad Thing, why are people buying from AM/PM? It says 'part of BP' right on the sign!"
Perhaps it was habit? Perhaps it was that the gas was 5cents cheaper a gallon?
This still bugs me to this day. Five cents a gallon, with each person having approximately a 10-15gal tank.. They couldn't or wouldn't spend 50-75 cents to send a message.
There are already a lot of posts saying "where would they go to?". I get that. I do. But we still need to pull our heads out of our (not so) collective asses. There is only one thing that a company fears, and that is a drop in profit. As long as it's profitable to take advantage of us, they will. It's not THAT much effort to be a conscious consumer. People have been doing it with food. They just need to extend it to other things.
...FREE!
When I was a kid, I learned the signs of desperation...bad customer service and expiring food...the first sign of any store going south. All the companies that had success, treated their customers with respect and didn't do any pennypicking. The first sign is ALWAYS pennypicking, the second sign is worker efficiency followed by unhappy overworked workers. The third and last sign, is when they're lashing out on their customer base, trying to fault the customers instead of their products - simply because they can't afford to fix it (and basically because we wanted cheap stuff for free to begin with).
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
And no, I don't think they abused their "product" either. They did what they always do--show people things selectively to elicit a response. Usually it's called "advertising." In this case called it "research."
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
You can't sue them as you agreed not to in the click-through EULA.
Binding Arbitration is a power grab by the corporates to enable them be bad actors
" Isn't it time customer starting fleeing abusive tech outfits?"
Sure, would love to move. Where do you want me to go, Boardwalk or Park Place?
I too dislike Comcast, my only option for non-dial-up internet (other than my cell provider, which I find myself preferring despite awful speeds & device limits).
But what options do I have? I can't bring my money elsewhere. Protesting in the USA has been deadly lately. So I'm encouraging the Comcast-TimeWarner merger. TW was just as bad when I lived in their monopoly. With 55% of the US forced into 1 very bad company, either:
- Enough people will wake up & complain to matter
- The US will no-longer be the place to have tech business, and then MAYBE regulators won't be able to ignore the economy getting trashed.
- Someone will talk about Monopoly sanctions like when AT&T had to share their lines.
That's because Apple can afford this. Apple customers are not the "gimme discount" crowd that is flooding the countries (don't think I'm lashing out at the US, it's entirely the same crap in Europe here).
People don't give a shit about quality anymore. Maybe because they're too used to getting quality that's on par with what they need. Customer protection laws pretty much ensure that getting swindled is getting harder. So whatever you buy, there's a good chance that it will work, at least initially, because you could take it back and get your money back if it didn't. Sure, it will break in a year or two (or whatever the laws of your country dictate it must work so you can't take it back and make the vendor eat it), but at least it works NOW, and who cares what's going to be in 2 years.
So people want cheaper. Because, hey, if that $no_brand laptop costs just 300 bucks and that $quality_brand costs 800, and they have the same CPU, same memory and same screen size, who in their sane mind would get that $quality_brand one?
Of course they'll complain as soon as (not if, not even when, AS SOON AS) that shoddy piece of plastic junk falls apart and they spend 3 hours in automated phone system hell to talk to Bob who has a weird accent that you can't quite pinpoint, but sounds like it would be Bangalore or Calcutta, who gets your data all wrong and messes up your mail-in repair request so you can have your laptop back within 6-8 weeks. Probably even repaired. More likely you get another one that someone else sent back in.
But that's what those other 500 bucks paid for in that more expensive laptop. Those 500 bucks paid for the guy that shows up at your door a day after your call to Bob (whose accent you can't quite put but you'e guess Kansas or Iowa, but at least he picked up at the second ring), hands you the replacement laptop where you just have to plug the harddrive (which you can easily take out of the laptop, unlike that $no_brand one where you'd probably need a CS degree, not to mention that taking the drive out would void the warranty) in and you're back in business.
But we want cheap.
So we get cheap.
And cheap is rarely if ever high in quality.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
No Facebook account (and blocked in DNS), no Twitter account (also blocked in DNS), not a subscriber of a Korean telecom, not a Comcast subscriber, switched providers when German Telekom failed to provide timely service to a business which I supported. Not using Chrome, not using Google apps on my phone, not shopping at Amazon. Going to quit Slashdot if they force Beta on me.
It's OK RMS, you don't have to post anonymously, we all know it's you.
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.
You don't have to put up with jerks.
For almost every crap business, there's a competitor that isn't crap. Find them.
People want cheap and get cheap because it's easy to tell what something's price is. f you have to choose between a cheap laptop and a more expensive laptop that has the same specs but might fall apart faster, it's really hard to get figures on how fast the laptops fall apart such that you can determine that the money you save is not worth it. Hiding laptop failure rates is easy, but you can't hide the price, so consumers buy based on it.
This may be better in the case of repeat customers, but honestly, how often do you buy laptops?
The "free market" rewards greed in all forms. It is intended to reward these behaviors.
The entire purpose of capitalism is to turn the greed in human nature into a force of productivity. But the side effect is that it rewards that greed. One of the only things that can keep that greed in check is regulation. But that has a side effect of creating a separate power base and thus regulatory capture and barriers to entry and so on. So what's the next step? How do we watch the watchers? We need a new framework for productivity but I am confident we can find it. Civilization and democracy has reliably marched forward. The world has (mostly) ended slavery, brought reading and writing to the masses, eradicated diseases, put a man on the moon, and so on.
This science of "how much the consumer will endure" is not limited to tech companies -- nor even customers. This is the approach of the corporation to all matters, legal, financial, PR, lobbying, etc. Anyone who thinks otherwise is naive. Sure there are a few good corporations, and some acts of altruism and benevolence. But the "free market" rewards greed.
So we need a new framework for productivity, and we need to start looking now.
long time ago, a slashdotter cut right to the chase when he posted "Microsoft is not a software company. they are an abuse company. they utilize software to inflict their abuse." somebody tore down the copy I had hanging next to the copier, so alas, I cannot credit the statement properly. easily 10 years ago, and it hasn't changed since.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned 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.